House of the Setting Son

We never got around to reading Native Son by Richard Wright this semester. This truth saddens me. Native Son would have made for a wonderful class discussion. We could have analyzed Richard Wright's past, and how his contributions to the literary world greatly shaped not only the progression of African American literature, but race relations as a product of systematized segregation.

I first read Richard Wright's Native Son when I was fifteen years old. It was the longest novel I had ever read up to that point in time, and the one that had the most effect on me as a reader and human being. Wright introduces the reader to Bigger Thomas, a twenty year old African American living in poverty in Chicago. The novel takes place over the course of three books: Fear, Flight, and Fate. The novel essentially works as a representation of the social injustices facing African Americans, who under the weight and pressure of stereotypes and discrimination succumb to the anticipation of the unforgiving white world. As author Frantz Fanon states in 1952 essay, L'Experience Vecue du Noir, or "The Fact of Blackness","In the end," writes Fanon, "Bigger Thomas acts. To put an end to his tension, he acts, he responds to the world's anticipation."

A novel like Native Son does not fit in with what has historically been described as Modernist literature. The American Modernist movement began roughly in 1914, a few years before the onset of World War I. As David Harvey wrote in his book The Condition of Postmodernity that modernity "can have no respect even for its own past...” it must embrace a meaning collected and defined “within the maelstrom of change”.

Now if there is one motif that Native Son cannot escape; that is cannot run from it is the past. It may not respect its past, and may want nothing more than to break free of its chains, but Native Son is restricted metaphorically by its impossible detachment from all things already done. Bigger is limited in his choices, Wright wants the reader to understand, but it is not due to a lack of ability or initiative, but the free will strangling systematic oppression of the white world.

Here is an excerpt from the novel. "The moment a situation became so that it excited something in him, he rebelled. That was the way he lived; he passed his days trying to defeat or gratify powerful impulses in a world he feared". Bigger's fear keeps him in constant motion. It is a fear that is not often found in modernist texts. There is little extravagance, and Wright's writing lends itself towards more of a Realistic style. Some even argue that Wright's works are not a part of the Modernist canon. This debate, though valid, is a superfluous one if the reader is discern the themes of Wright's text.

Works Cited

Fanon, Frantz. "The Fact of Blackness." Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove, 2008. Print.

Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990.

Wright, Richard. Native Son. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2005. 44. Print.