SECTION F: NON - AFRICAN PROSE NATIVE SON - RICHARD WRIGHT What have you learned about black life from the conversation between Bigger and Gus at the entran...

Early in Richard Wright's Native Son, Bigger Thomas and his friend Gus loiter outside the pool room and fall into conversation. Though brief, the exchange is deeply revealing, teaching the reader a great deal about the condition of black life in a segregated American city.

The confinement of black lives. As the two watch an aeroplane overhead and later imagine themselves as generals, financiers and public men, Gus reminds Bigger that such roles are closed to them: they cannot fly planes, cannot run big businesses, cannot enter the white world of power. This shows that black life is hemmed in by rigid barriers of race, and that the horizons open to white Americans are sealed off from black youth.

A world divided by a wall. Bigger speaks of the whites living 'over there' and of himself feeling shut outside, as though behind a curtain or a wall. The conversation teaches that black people inhabit a separate, restricted world, aware of but excluded from the opportunities and freedoms enjoyed on the other side of the colour line.

Frustration, anger and shame. The talk is charged with resentment. Bigger feels the humiliation of exclusion so keenly that he says it makes him feel he is on the outside of the world looking in. This exposes the psychological damage that constant denial inflicts, breeding bitterness and a smouldering rage.

Fear disguised as violence. Significantly, when the planned robbery of Blum's store looms, Bigger masks his own fear by bullying Gus, picking a fight to avoid the crime. This teaches that the pressures of black life produce a fear so deep that it turns inward into cruelty against one's own friends.

In conclusion, the pool-room conversation between Bigger and Gus teaches that black life under segregation is one of confinement, exclusion, frustration and fear. In a few exchanges Wright lays bare the social wall that shapes Bigger and foreshadows the violence to come.