SECTION B NON-AFRICAN PROSE RICHARD WRIGHT: Native Son 5. Comment on Bigger's last moments with Max. 6. Examine Bigger's visits to Bessie in the novel

Answer Details

5. Bigger's last moments with Max. In Richard Wright's Native Son, the final meeting between Bigger Thomas and his lawyer, Boris Max, in the death cell is one of the most powerful scenes in the novel. Awaiting execution for the killing of Mary Dalton, Bigger at last begins to talk openly, reaching a kind of self-understanding he has never had before. Where Max had defended him as a product of a racist, oppressive society, a victim shaped by fear and blind circumstance, Bigger in these last moments claims his acts as his own. He confesses the disturbing truth that in the very violence that doomed him he felt, for the first time, alive and free: "what I killed for, I am". This chills Max, who cannot fully accept it. The scene shows Bigger accepting responsibility and finding a terrible, hard-won sense of identity even on the edge of death. It also exposes the gap between Max's sociological pity and Bigger's lived reality. The parting is bleak yet strangely affirming: Bigger faces death without whining, having found meaning, and he asks Max to tell his mother he was all right. The scene crowns Wright's exploration of oppression, fear and the search for selfhood.

6. Bigger's visits to Bessie. Bessie Mears, Bigger's girlfriend, is central to the second phase of the novel, and Bigger's visits to her reveal both his character and the destructiveness of the world that made him. Bessie is a poor, overworked black woman who drowns her weariness in drink, and Bigger goes to her for comfort, sex and, later, help. After the killing of Mary, Bigger turns to Bessie and draws her into his crime, using her to help with the botched ransom scheme against the Daltons. His visits show his exploitation of her: he takes from her what he needs while giving little in return, treating her much as the white world treats him. When Bessie becomes a liability and a witness who could betray him, Bigger murders her brutally, first raping her and then killing her with a brick and throwing her body down an air-shaft. The Bessie episodes therefore expose Bigger's capacity for cruelty, the cheapness of black life in the novel's world (her death is barely noticed by the authorities compared with Mary's), and the way oppression breeds further violence among the oppressed themselves.