NON-AFRICAN PROSE RICHARD WRIGHT: Native Son Consider the view that it is the society that makes Bigger a murderer in the novel.

Answer Details

Richard Wright's Native Son invites the reader to see Bigger Thomas not simply as a criminal by nature but as the product of a racist and oppressive society. While Bigger bears personal responsibility for his acts, the novel builds a powerful case that the environment of segregated, poverty-stricken Chicago shapes him into a murderer.

Poverty and confinement. From the opening scene, Bigger's world is one of deprivation: a single cramped room shared by the whole family, rats, unemployment and hopelessness. The white-controlled economy denies black people decent housing, education and opportunity. Boxed into the Black Belt, Bigger grows up with fear, shame and suppressed rage, the raw materials of violence.

Fear as a conditioned response. Bigger's first killing, the death of Mary Dalton, is not premeditated. He smothers her in panic, terrified of being discovered in a white girl's bedroom, knowing that a black man found there would be presumed guilty of rape and lynched. It is precisely the society's racial terror, its lethal codes governing contact between black men and white women, that turns an accident into a killing. Society, in effect, writes the script for the crime.

Dehumanisation and the denial of identity. Constantly told what he may and may not do, watched, feared and despised, Bigger is stripped of a sense of full humanity. The white world offers him no legitimate outlet for ambition or self-worth. Violence becomes, paradoxically, the only act through which he feels he has created something and exercised a will of his own, a terrible measure of how completely society has crippled him.

Max's argument. Boris Max, Bigger's lawyer, makes the case explicit in the courtroom: Bigger is the creation of a system that has oppressed and excluded millions like him. His crime is the fruit of accumulated injustice, and to condemn him without condemning the society that made him is hypocrisy.

A balanced view. The novel does not wholly excuse Bigger; his second killing, of Bessie, is more deliberate, and he remains morally accountable. Yet Wright's overriding argument is sociological: individual guilt cannot be separated from the vast structures of racism, poverty and fear that produced this man.

In conclusion, the view that society makes Bigger a murderer is strongly supported by the novel. Wright presents Bigger as a native son of America, formed by its racism and inequality, so that his violence stands as an indictment not merely of one man but of the society that shaped him.