Early on in Native Son, Bigger watches a pigeon “strutting to and fro with ruffled feathers, its fat neck bobbing with regal pride.” After watching the bird, Bigger says to his friend Gus, “Now, if only I could do that.” This scene can be compared to an idea from Beloved, in which Paul D has been dehumanized to the point that he feels like a rooster named Mister has more dignity than he does.
Native Son – 1
Native Son – 2
Bigger hates Gus, who is holding out on Bigger’s plan to commit a robbery, because Gus’s fear reflects his own. He fears Gus because if Gus agrees to commit the robbery, Bigger “would be compelled to go through with” it.
Native Son – 3
Bigger thinks to himself “Poor white people are stupid,” because they haven’t prospered, even though they have the social advantage of being white. His mother has given him the impression that wealthy white people like black people better than they like poor white people.
Native Son – 4
After Bigger picks a fight with his running mates, so he can ruin the plan he’d initiated to rob a white man, he’s unconsciously aware of the fact that he feared the prospect of committing the robbery. But he can’t acknowledge this fear. Wright writes, “his courage to live depended upon how successfully his fear was hidden from his consciousness.”
Native Son – 5
Mrs. Dalton, the woman who owns the house where Bigger works, is blind and ethereal and dressed in white clothing. Her appearance operates metaphorically, suggesting the she and other white people are blind to the individuality of Bigger and other black people. For instance, she is quite interested in helping black people, but she wants to help them the way she thinks they need to be helped. After she talks to Bigger about going to school, Bigger “felt that Mrs. Dalton wanted him to do the things she felt that he should have wanted to do.”
Native Son – 6
When he’s in his apartment with his family, after visiting the Dalton’s home, Wright writes about Bigger, “He hated this room and all the people in it, including himself.” This may help to explain why he hated Gus, whose fear reminded him of himself. Bigger also thinks to himself that he and his family might be forced to live this way because they’d never “done anything, right or wrong, that mattered much.” Conservatives might agree with this opinion. Liberals might believe the inverse of Bigger’s thought, that his family had never done anything that mattered because they lived in stultifying conditions.
Native Son – 7
Double consciousness is evident in Bigger’s thought that “He was black and he had been alone in a room where a white girl had been killed; therefore he had killed her. That was what everybody would say anyhow, no matter what he said.”
Native Son – 8
Bigger thinks because he is black, Mrs. Dalton would not have been suspected of being in her daughter’s bedroom. He believes he isn’t factored into Mrs. Dalton’s thinking in that kind of social situation, and this makes her and other white people figuratively blind, in the same way that Mrs. Dalton his literally blind.
Native Son – 10
“To Bigger and his kind white people were not really people; they were a sort of great natural force, like a stormy sky looming overhead…” This can be compared to the Kantian notion of sublimity, and furthermore, to the idea that people delude themselves into believing that they are sublime by brutalizing other people.
Native Son – 11
Bigger likes hearing about brutal dictators or perpetrators of genocide because he believes this brutality offers “possible avenues of escape” from the “tight morass of fear and shame that sapped at the base of his life.” Maybe this “escape” is sought by others who try to make themselves sublime by abusing people.
Native Son – 12
Bigger feels secure in the fact that Mrs. Dalton won’t ask him certain questions about her daughter because “She would be ashamed to let him think that something was so wrong in her family that she had to ask him, a black servant, about it.” This maintenance of distance between people that is based on race and class keeps Bigger from being suspected of his crime. It keeps him Invisible.
Native Son – 13
The word “invisible” comes up often as Bigger thinks about what he’s done. Bigger reflects on the fact that by killing Mary, “he had shed an invisible burden he had long carried” and that the act had made him realize that “his hands held weapons that were invisible.” Of his girlfriend, Bigger says “Bessie, too, was very blind” and he has a similar impression of his family, becoming emboldened when he sees “how blind they were.” Other people’s “blindness” makes him invisible.
Native Son – 14
Bigger is proud of the agency he feels behind his invisibility. He boasts to his girlfriend, Bessie, that people won’t suspect him of his crime, saying “They won’t think we did [it]. They don’t think we got guts enough to do it. They think niggers is too scared…”
Native Son – 15
Bigger feels something akin to Kant’s sublimity when he makes his girlfriend, Bessie, worried. Wright writes “He was enjoying her agony, seeing and feeling the worth of himself in her bewildered expression.”
Native Son – 17
In what might be regarded as a reference to DuBois’s symbol of The Veil, Bigger is separated from the white man who he’s tried to frame for his crime as “huge wet flakes of snow floated down slowly, forming a delicate screen between them.”
Native Son – 18
As Bigger hears Mrs. Dalton’s grief over the disappearance of her daughter, he feels safe because he knows he’s “invisible” to her, but he also “felt that he was living upon a high pinnacle where bracing winds whipped about him.” This can be compared to Kant’s notion of the sublime.