Native Sun: Lightness and Darkness in Native Son (Report‪)‬

CRITICS OF RICHARD WRIGHT'S Native Son have paid much attention to the novel's environment and its power to influence the experiences of those who inhabit it. Understood as the arena in which the consequences of cultural, economic, and ideological practices become manifest, the environment is supposed to offer insight into the lives of individuals within it. Louis Graham, writing in 1972 about what he terms the "white self-image conflict" in Native Son, begins his essay by stating that "there is no question that Richard Wright's Native Son is Bigger Thomas' novel and that Wright places major emphasis on the social, cultural, and economic influences in the development of Bigger's character" ("White Self-Image" 19). Various elements of Bigger's environment--understood as offering insight into the shaping of his internal state of mind or his "character"--have remained a point of focus. More recent claims that Bigger is "a tragic victim of implacable social forces" (Goldstein 120), or that "it is space itself which shapes and limits his agency" (Soto 26) are representative of the tendency to emphasize the external environment's role in shaping Bigger as an individual (or as a stereotype). (1) And while readings of the novel's environment are crucial for understanding Bigger as well as the novel's other characters, the assumption that Bigger is shaped (always in a limiting, rather than productive way) by his environment squelches the possibility of understanding a more reciprocal relationship between Bigger and the world in which he lives. WE MUST also consider that the novel itself contains a reading of its own environment, and so can be said to anticipate and respond to the kinds of interpretations characterized above. This reading comes by way of Max, who, pleading to the court on Bigger's behalf, draws attention to the social environment, claiming that the "hate" and "fear" which he says underlie Bigger's actions are "woven by our civilization into the very structure of his consciousness, into his blood and bones, into the hourly functioning of his personality" (Wright 400). But the person with the most at stake--Bigger--does not fully understand Max's argument, and it ultimately proves unconvincing and ineffective within the courtroom. Even readers inclined to agree with Max's reasoning may question his belittling references to Bigger as a "boy," or the fact that his argument mainly ignores Bigger as an individual (Wright 383). Through Max, the novel suggests that even those who are aware of and even sympathetic to the realities of Bigger's life are not fully capable of understanding the ways in which those realities influence consciousness, and vice versa.