Usha Mudiganti
The Lost Generation: American Literature between the World Wars
November 23, 2016
RASICM IN NATIVE SON
Native Son, Author Richard Wright surfaced in 1940.during the peak time of world war-2.when the whole world was in turbulence both economically and politically. At this time when the novel surfaced the world has been taken by strife by the devastating effects of world war 2. The novel stays away from the political issue of the world that is world war-2 but hugely depicts what was going in America which itself is a world within. Racism, illiteracy, newly found unions for blacks and unemployment among the black community.
At the time when native son came out in the 1940 it was the same time when the Jim Crow law was …show more content…
“let jesus lead you and Roosevelt feed you”(quoted in robert s. McElvaine. The great depression: America ,1929-1941,1933) . these words spoken by a black minister to his congregation shortly before the 1936 presidential election.
After the great depression the blacks were the first one to loose their jobs at farms and other big companies where they generally did menial work. They were hard struck by the atrocities of the great depression . the American government provided public works employement out of which aso the blacks were not give employment which generally available to all americans whether they were whites or blacks …show more content…
To apply this theory to Wright's use of the novel and of literary naturalism, we would notice that the material conditions of Bigger Thomas's life what he ate, how he paid the rent, what kind of work he did all these determined his ideas. Moreover, the material conditions of Mr. Dalton's life determined his ideas as well. Both Bigger Thomas and Mr. Dalton are blind to the connection between Dalton's wealth and Thomas's poverty. The power of the ruling class is maintained when the working class is kept in ignorance. The ethics of the ruling class is relieve when its members address the economic problems of a mass of people with individualistic charity. Richard Wright beautifully create a connection between wealth and poverty. He does so by showing the connection between the images of the stereotyped brutish African-Americans and the sophisticated whites and the reality of that unjust gap in