Stereotypes In Richard Wright's Native Son

Richard Wright’s Native Son follows an African-American man named Bigger Thomas, whose world crumbled after he accidentally murders Mary Dalton, the daughter of his rich, White employers. Throughout the novel, Richard Wright continually brings up a certain detail: Mary’s head, freshly cut from her shoulders by Bigger Thomas. In fact, whenever an image of her head is shown through the narrator, Bigger Thomas feels only feels one thing: fear. True, he feels that throughout the novel, but just the envisioning the dead Mary’s chopped head makes him afraid of something. To make it clearer, Mary’s head represents the African-Americans’ biggest fear, which was concocted by the White supremacists. The Dalton’s interactions with Bigger seem genuine, …show more content…
With that said, Bigger Thomas represents these oppressions whereas the Daltons, namely Mr. Dalton himself, represents the oppressor. To bring up an example, after Bigger lets the readers in on the fact that Mr. Dalton owns the apartment his family lives in, Mr. Dalton says that “[he] is going to give [Bigger] $25. The extra $5 is for [him]… [he[ can give the $20 to [his] mother to keep [his] brother and sister in school” (Wright 52). Here, Mr. Dalton willingly ups the pay wage from $20 to $25 a week, but he robs him of that $20 by telling him to give it back to his mother, who will use it for Buddy and Vera’s schooling and the rent. In short, Bigger is just giving the money right back to Mr. Dalton. In Fate, Wright explicitly shows Mr. Dalton to represent …show more content…
When he accidentally killed Mary, of course he felt fear, but that fear blossomed into paranoia at certain points. The beginning of this paranoia shows when Mrs. Dalton explains to Mr. Dalton that something was amiss about Mary’s bed and the clothes that were left on the bed, and “Bigger stopped listening, feeling fear for the first time… how could he explain that she had told him to take a half-packed trunk to the station” (Wright 120). While he did feel a certain pride, Bigger questioned himself about what to do about hiding the evidence. In cases like these, though, he makes up ways to lie in order to not get caught or make it seem suspicious. The only other way to see his paranoia is when he questions himself about checking the furnace. In fact, even when he doesn’t check the furnace as requested here and there, he questions if her body burned, and when he does check, “he himself did not want to poke in it, for fear that some part of Mary was still there” (Wright 113). This paranoia is justified for him, as if Mary is shown to represent something to the White