“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 – 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 – 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.