SECTION F: NON - AFRICAN PROSE RICHARD WRIGHT: Native Son With reference to three symbols, discuss Wright’s use of symbolism in the novel.

Answer Details

Richard Wright loads Native Son with symbols that externalise the racial fear, poverty and repression that drive Bigger Thomas. Discussing three of them clarifies how the physical world of the novel mirrors its social meaning.

1. The rat. The opening scene, in which Bigger corners and kills a huge black rat in the one cramped room the family shares, is the novel's controlling symbol. The trapped, snarling rat that lashes out before it is beaten to death anticipates Bigger himself: hemmed into the Black Belt of Chicago by white society, cornered and terrified, he too strikes out violently and is finally hunted down and destroyed. The rat establishes at once that the story is about a creature driven to blind aggression by entrapment.

2. The white cat and the colour white generally. Whiteness saturates the novel as a symbol of the dominant, threatening white world. Mrs. Dalton, blind and dressed in white, drifts about her house like a ghost and stands for a white power that cannot truly "see" black humanity yet controls its fate. The white cat that leaps onto Bigger's shoulder in the Dalton basement, and the swirling white snow through which he is finally pursued and captured, extend this: white is the colour of surveillance, judgement and inescapable pressure closing in on him.

3. The furnace. The Dalton furnace, into which Bigger stuffs Mary's body, symbolises concealment, guilt and the destructive fire of his situation. It seems to swallow his crime, giving him a false sense of power and control, but it also smoulders and finally chokes with ash, betraying him when the bones are discovered. The furnace thus stands for the buried truth that will not stay hidden and for the consuming rage that has been kindled in Bigger.

Other images reinforce these, notably the blindness that afflicts nearly every character (Mrs. Dalton literally, the others morally) and the snowstorm that traps the city during the manhunt. Through such symbolism Wright turns a crime story into a powerful indictment of a society that cages black people and then condemns them for behaving like caged things.