“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 – 10
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 – 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.