Native Son Parallelism

While well-known, the story of a man fated to kill his father then marry his mother appears to be hardly relevant to anything other than crass jokes. Despite Homer’s Grecian tragedy being the beginning of the understood structure of tragedies, a repeating circle of events that is not broken over time, Oedipus’ plight is often not thought to be duplicated by modern writers. That is, except for Richard Wright. In his novel Native Son, Wright utilizes plot devices from Oedipus Rex to delve into the continued oppression of blacks in urban America. Through utilizing parallelism to Homer’s classic tragedy, Wright presents Bigger, a microcosm for black masculinity and urban black individuals, with an oracle of inescapable failure which leads to Bigger’s …show more content…
Instead of being imparted by a prophet of the gods, Bigger’s oracle appears in a vastly more modern form, a political campaign ad. “The poster showed one of those faces that looked straight at you...and all the while you were walking and turning your head to look at it it kept looking unblinkingly back at you until you got so far from it you had to take your eyes away… Above the top of the poster were tall red letters: YOU CAN’T WIN!” (Wright, 13). Bigger immediately responds by mocking the poster and projecting the oracle onto the messenger by accusing the political figure …show more content…
While in the classical tragedy Oedipus, having realized the prophecy of him killing his father and marrying his mother came true, cuts out his own eyes in order to punish himself while still rejecting reality. Wright incorporates the denial of reality and blindness more subtly in Bigger’s own blindness, indicating that when Bigger reaches the climax of the realization that the prophecy came true of his own accord he will experience an ontological meltdown and must change his coping mechanism. At a point after realizing he had successfully burned the body and hid the evidence, Bigger poses the question “‘What was stopping him” from killing again? Bigger “felt that he was arriving at something which had long eluded him. Things were becoming clear; he would know how to act from now on…” (106). Bigger, blind to the reality of the situation that he couldn’t escape his crimes and that more murders wouldn’t end his anger or afford him more power, accepts killing as a means to generate autonomy. Autonomy in rejecting his family and the notion that he could do better for himself (therefore invalidating the oracle and taking the third road), when “he felt in the quiet presence of his mother, brother and sister…. Making for