By Delbert Tran
Georgetown University

Abstract:

In the 20^th century, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, two of most prominent black writers in America, shared a close relationship, both intellectually and personally. As time passed, however, differences soon divided them. The two writers seemed to diverge upon the topic of freedom, and its relationship with black experience in their writing. Wright, in Native Son employed the technique of literary naturalism to depict socioeconomic conditions denied the freedom of black Americans, as depicted in his protagonist, Bigger Thomas. For Ellison, this naturalist technique fell short of true literature by reducing the fullness of the black person to his or her environment, failing to create a rich representation of black experience that could transcend these limits and become free. As Ellison commented, “Wright could imagine Bigger, but Bigger could not possibly imagine Richard Wright” (Ellison, “The World and the Jug”). In this essay, I explore the literary relationship between Wright and Ellison’s seminal works, Native Son and Invisible Man, particularly engaging in their intellectual dimensions and the different theories of freedom that their two novels present. While I concur with Ellison’s vision of freedom as a possibility in literary transcendence, I explore the hints of this literary transcendence that leak through in Wright’s Native Son. I find that Ellison’s criticism of Wright is thereby misguided, since their two works share much in common. I conclude that the push towards freedom is present as much in the act of reading as it is in the act of writing, and that the significance of this act of imaginative empathy is still an important lesson to learn in a period where current events still demonstrate the challenge our society has in reconciling itself with race and violence.

If a man forgets his freedom, perhaps it can be said that he is no longer free. Caught in the crowded corners of broken-down neighborhoods, Bigger Thomas scrambles to find shelter in Native Son. Though Bigger flees from the police, running through endless urban blocks to preserve his freedom, the narrative of his escape speaks with the inevitability of a desperate man driven along a path that has already been staked out before him, committed to a spiraling path of violence. In contrast to Bigger’s frantic retreat, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible wanders the city of Harlem in Invisible Man beholden to the schemes of others; struggling with his grandfather’s deathbed command to “agree ‘em to death and destruction,” (Ellison 16) Invisible’s journey confronts the paradox of finding individual freedom within a web of social relations. Richard Wright’s Native Son and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, then, present different models of agency in America. In Native Son, Bigger Thomas finds freedom in violence, freedom in the concrete form of action. In Invisible Man, however, Ellison offers a different definition of freedom: freedom in the ability to communicate one’s ideas and identity, since ideas and identity form the source of human action. Ultimately, Ellison takes this understanding of freedom further – communication takes on a normative role, where novels serve to communicate a vision of human reality. For Ellison, Wright’s Native Son falls short of this standard; he sees Wright’s naturalistic emphasis on socioeconomic forces and their subsequent violence as a text that fails to express the humanistic richness of black experience. Yet, I argue that beneath Wright’s rhetoric of literary naturalism, the humanistic values expressed by Ellison begin to leak out, revealing the way in which Wright, like Ellison, was concerned primarily with the existential exploration of what it means to be a black American.

In Native Son, it is clear that socioeconomic opportunities are far and few between for its protagonist, Bigger Thomas. When loitering with Gus near the beginning of the novel, the two discuss the limited prospects they have for the future. Drawing attention to a plane in the sky and a pigeon that swoops in sight, Wright employs rather straightforward imagery to describe the condition of Bigger, grounded but desiring the freedom of flight embodied in the planes and the birds, a flight that is accessible to whites, but not to him. As Gus proclaims, “Them white boys sure can fly,” prompting Bigger to respond, “Yeah…They get a chance to do everything” (Wright 28). Though the figure of flight is quite prominent, the similarly repeated imagery of the street car serves to underscore that it is the idea of mobility contrasting with the constraints of urban environment. Bigger observes, “A street car rumbled forward and the pigeon rose swiftly through the air on wings stretched so taut and sheer that Bigger could see the gold of the sun through their translucent tips. He tilted his head and watched the slate-colored bird flap and wheel out of sight over the edge of a high roof” (Wright 31). The motion of the street car, like the plane, is another sign of how industrial technologies in the twentieth century confer advantages that are beyond Bigger and Black Americans – the street car, like the plane, cars, and bird, all pass Bigger by, leaving him still in his spot. More importantly, the motion of vehicles perhaps presents one of the most concrete utterances of change, where an individual can literally perceive their physical environment alter along with their movement. There is a sheer physicality to the possibilities presented to Bigger, and his perspective is physically limited beneath “the edge of a high roof,” the architecture of the city that these images of flight transcend. After all, it is perhaps notable that in the end of Book 2, aptly titled “Flight,” Bigger finds himself on a rooftop, trapped, unable to scale the physical structure of the city. The use of the urban environment in Native Son, along with various depictions of poverty in Bigger’s family (Wright 23) and those whom he observes (Wright 182), make clear the influence of literary naturalism in Wright’s text, and the significance of material structures in shaping the life of Bigger Thomas.

In response to these limits, Bigger finds his own sense of freedom in the act of violence, which he reflects upon after his murder of Mary. Sitting at the breakfast table,

The thought of what he had done, the awful horror of it, the daring associated with such actions, formed for him for the first time in his fear-ridden life a barrier of protection between him and a world he feared. He had murdered and had created a new life for himself. It was something that was all his own, and it was the first time in his life he had had anything that others could not take from him. (Wright 86)

Immediately, there is an oxymoron at play in Bigger’s commission of murder – a destructive act is described as being a creative one, of murder having “created…new life for himself.” The antithetical relationship between the destructiveness of the act and the creation of identity, however, is understood when the binary of destruction and creation are posited in terms of the corresponding binary that Bigger presents, “between him and a world he feared.” The act of murder, in other words, is creative because it negates an aspect of the “world he feared,” that which he is not. Mary, with her wealth and her whiteness, and even her kindness, represents a world that is external to him. Murdering her therefore affirms his identity in opposition to this external world, defined in the distinctiveness of its separation, hence the “barrier of protection” that it creates. The life of Bigger and the life of the external world seem to operate as zero-sum; when reminiscing with Gus, for example, Bigger points out: “We live here and they live there. We black and they white. They got things and we ain’t. They do things and we can’t” (Wright 31). Bigger’s assertion of his life, then, comes at the life of the white world. Freedom in such a light exists in terms of oppositional forces – because wills conflict, and freedom is the unbridled expression of an individual’s will, true freedom is the supremacy of one’s will over the wills of others. Such a theory of freedom proclaims a facet of freedom that is perhaps so obvious that it often falls into the background: that freedom is understood in this way to be synonymous with radical individuality. Violence, then, ascribes the boundaries of that Bigger’s individuality; to be a free black person, he must affirm the individuality of his blackness by negating that which he is not – the whiteness.

This model of violence as freedom is further echoed in the speech given by Max, Bigger’s attorney near the end of Native Son. In the speech, Max identifies freedom as the new life created out of violence. He explains,

He murdered Mary Dalton accidentally, without thinking, without plan, without conscious motive…It was the first full act of his life; it was the most meaningful, exciting and stirring thing that had ever happened to him. He accepted it because it made him free, gave him the possibility of choice, of action, the opportunity to act and to feel that his actions carried weight. (Wright 290)

Repeating Bigger’s thoughts in part two of Native Son, this passage invokes the same precise language of murder bringing “life.” Even further, Max’s statement elaborates by adding that the murder is also “the most meaningful, exciting, and stirring thing that had ever happened to [Bigger].” Max offers more clarity on why violence might be a particularly liberating act. Besides its role in creating a conceptual divide between the individual and Other, violence also is a material act that leaves a visceral effect. As Max points out, the murder allows Bigger “to feel that his actions carried weight.” While the phrase describes Bigger beginning to understand his existence as a being with agency, with the capacity to make choices and enact his will upon the external world, the very nature of that phrase, “carry weight,” underscores the materiality of this external world. The feeling of carrying weight is descriptor that invokes physical sensation, weight signifying the presence of physical matter. This discussion of freedom in Native Son offers a very concrete sense of freedom, where freedom exists, or at least, is most accessible, in the tangible manifestation of a person’s actions. Thus, to be is to be free, and to be free is to act, and violence is the strongest form of action for Bigger.

In Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the protagonist, Invisible, recognizes the appeal of this definition of freedom as violence. As he comments in the prologue,

…you often doubt if you really exist…It’s when you feel like this that, out of resentment, you begin to bump people back. And let me confess, you feel that way most of the time. You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you’re a part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And, alas, it’s seldom successful. (Ellison 4)

Like Bigger, Invisible acknowledges the desire to “strike out with your fists” in order to “convince yourself that you do exist in the real world,” to use physical acts to declare a physical presence in a “real world” whose reality is enmeshed in its physicality. But unlike Bigger, Invisible dismisses the efficacy of this approach. For Invisible, the assertion of existence extends beyond physicality in the very title of the novel and opening line: Invisible understands himself to be invisible, to have qualities that escape the merely physical account of surfaces and appearances. Though Invisible acknowledges his physical embodiment, as “a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids,” (Ellison 3) he goes on to add that “I might even be said to possess a mind” (Ellison 3). Referring to “mind,” rather than brain, Ellison reaffirms the additional human element that extends beyond the physicality of the body, the consciousness. Its intangibility is made even clearer with the tongue in cheek qualifier that it “might” be there, “might” alluding to, ironically, our minds’ uncertainty in comprehending the insubstantiality of concepts like the mind itself.

But Invisible’s privileging of the immaterial over the material is made clear in his violent encounter with the stranger at the start. In Invisible’s words, “…in my outrage I got out my knife and prepared to slit his throat…when it occurred to me that the man had not seen me, actually; that he, as far as he knew, was in the midst of a walking nightmare!…a man almost killed by a phantom” (Ellison 4). Further differentiating himself from Bigger, Invisible stays his hand before he commits the act of murder. Though in a rage, his violence is interrupted by a thought. The thought that occurs to Invisible counteracts the physicality of his violence, not only in the thought’s very occurrence – as an intangible, mental phenomenon – but in the subject of the thought. Invisible’s mind imagines the mind of the stranger, distinguishing psychic perception from physical perception in the assertion that “the man had not seen me, actually.” Tacking on “actually,” Invisible is conceding that the stranger has perceived him in some way – or perceived something, at the very least – but that the stranger failed to truly perceive what was there. The stranger failed to see who Invisible is. In fact, Invisible claims that the stranger saw a phantom, which denotes the illusory, immaterial nature of what is perceived, wherein the perception of a person is shaped by the psychic forces in their head. Interestingly, there is also a medical definition of phantom, where the term refers to “a model of the body or one of its parts” (“Phantom”). The dual meaning of the term phantom illustrates how the stranger fails to escape his own mind and see the mind of the Other, of Invisible, and in doing so, only perceives the outline of a being, the materiality of Invisible; this materiality, however, is merely a “model of the body,” and not of the mind nor identity that yearns to truly be seen.

This emphasis upon identity and the ideas that form it lead Ellison to presenting an alternative definition of freedom in Invisible’s imagination. In the dreamlike dungeon of Invisible’s ideas, he confronts an old slave woman on the meaning of freedom. At first, Invisible suggests, “Maybe freedom lies in hating,” (Ellison 11) an explanation that would align with Bigger’s model of violence as freedom. But the old woman replies with the opposite: “Naw, son, it’s in loving” (Ellison 11). Referring to her former slave master, the old woman describes an odd dynamic in her attitude towards him: “I dearly loved my master, son…He gave me several sons….and because I loved my sons I learned to love their father thought I hated him too” (Ellison 10). As with Bigger, a binary of polar opposites comes into play. With Bigger it was life and murder, and with Invisible, we see a paralleling dichotomy of love and hate. Whereas Bigger’s scene presented the two as zero-sum, in which the murder of one brought life to the other because only one could live, Invisible’s scenario treats the dichotomy differently, merging the two opposites into one paradoxical relationship of simultaneous love and hate. Ellison’s push back against the zero-sum concept of freedom is captured in the imagery of the sons and father. The image of the son is itself a repudiation of individuality – not only is the relation a sign of familial interconnectedness and dependency, in which a son depends upon family for rearing and development, the son is the literal product of two individuals coming together. And even though the old woman may hate the father for his enslavement, she embraces the negativity because her unity with it provided the means for creating something new. Furthermore, addressing Invisible with the familiar term “son,” the old woman’s extends her observation beyond the particularity of her circumstance – which, in its sweepingly vague reference to masters and sons born from masters, is already general enough to function allegorically – to encompass Invisible and the greater scope of race relations in America. The contemporary American society is itself the byproduct of fused culture and history, even through its history of injustice and suffering, all of which is integrated in the birth of new cultural life.

Eventually, the discussion with the old woman leads to her presenting an unorthodox definition of freedom, as the ability to communicate one’s thoughts. When Invisible asks, “Old woman, what is this freedom you love so well?” (Ellison 11) she finally replies: “I done forgot, son. It’s all mixed up. First I think it’s one thing, then I think it’s another…I guess now it ain’t nothing but knowing how to say what I got up in my head.” (Ellison 11). Though the old woman professes some initial confusion, her comment that “it’s all mixed up” reinforces the previous point of comparison between Bigger and Invisible, where Invisible’s freedom exists in the procreative mixing of things, rather than in the dissociative individuality of violence. The product of this synthesis, interestingly, is the model of freedom as “knowing how to say what I got up in my head.” But what exactly is the relationship between communication and freedom? Continuing on her train of thought, the old woman says, “But it’s a hard job, son…Hit’s like I have a fever. Ever’ time I starts to walk my head gits to swirling and I falls down” (Ellison 11). Here, the added context explains the tie between communication and freedom. Notably, her head, the source of her thoughts, is tied to her actions. If her “head gits to swirling,” she “falls down,” unable to walk, unable to move. The chaos in her thoughts affects her actions because her thoughts are the source of her actions. “Knowing how to say what I got up in my head” offers clarity in organizing those thoughts, thereby offering insight into why a person acts the way that he or she chooses to act.

If freedom involves choice, then communication is integral to freedom given the way that choice is a convergence of identity and action. In order to be free, a person does not merely act, but wills that very act, the will being a manifestation of that person’s identity. Communication serves the role of expressing and organizing the ideas that shape a person’s identity, and in so doing shape the source of free choices and actions. Ellison argues such a point in his various essays when he describes the function and role of writing. In his essay, “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity,” Ellison states,

Perhaps the most insidious and least understood form of segregation is that of the word. And by this I mean the word in all its complex formulations, from the proverb to the novel and stage play, the word with all its subtle power to suggest and foreshadow overt action while magically disguising the moral consequences of that action and providing it with symbolic and psychological justification. For if the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison, and destroy. (Ellison 81).

As he explains, communication – through the written form of the word, expressing the ideas within our heads – has the “power to suggest and foreshadow overt action” by “providing it with symbolic and psychological justification.” In other words, it provides the reasons for action, as articulated earlier. The implications of it are so strong that Ellison claims that communication has both “the potency to…make us free” and “the power to blind, imprison, and destroy.” Words accomplish this outcome by creating various images of society and reality that produce norms of behavior, constricting what is acceptable or justifiable. And it is these various norms that influence the capacity for individuals to make choices or recognize themselves as persons capable of making choices that they deem meaningful. This has the effect, for instance, of determining whether an individual can make the choice to pursue a certain career without the barrier of racial discrimination foreclosing him her of that very option.

Following the arguments so far, freedom has gradually grown as a concept. With Bigger, freedom existed in the concreteness of an action (what I shall refer to as “concrete freedom,” freedom in the form of an action). With Invisible, freedom has been amended to be an action that is grounded in reasons for action, manifested in the ideas and identity of the actor (what I shall refer to as “justified freedom,” freedom in the form of the mental motives behind an action). Going even further, Ellison points out that freedom is not merely any “justified” action (justified only in the sense that there is an ostensible reason for action), but that freedom is normatively justified in promoting an outcome truly beneficial to the self-realization of the American individual and his or her society (what I shall refer to as “normative freedom,” freedom in the form of the human drive for self-realization). Ellison elaborates on this point about normative freedom in the introduction to Invisible Man, where he writes:

Here it would seem that the interests of art and democracy converge, the development of conscious, articulate citizens being an established goal of this democratic society…By way of imposing meaning upon our disparate American experience the novelist seeks to create forms in which acts, scenes and characters speak for more than their immediate selves…For by a trick of fate (and our racial problems notwithstanding) the human imagination is integrative – and the same is true of the centrifugal force that inspirits the democratic process. And while fiction is but a form of symbolic action, a mere game of “as if,” therein lies its true function and its potential for effecting change. For at its most serious, just as is true of politics at its best, it is a thrust toward a human ideal. (Ellison xx)

For Ellison, it is not enough to have a person be able to justify his or her choices in order to be free. These choices must be good choices, must strive towards something valuable in “a thrust toward a human ideal.” And Ellison identifies that ideal by pointing to “democratic society.” While democracy is a term frequently associated with freedom in all its forms, it expresses a particular vision of freedom in a collective form, a coexistence of many individuals within one society. The tension between individual and society has long been a problem for philosophers and social thinkers, an issue that Immanuel Kant referred to as the “unsocial sociability of men,” (Kant) where humans find themselves both needing society to transcend the insufficiencies of individuality while simultaneously chafing when various wills conflict. For Ellison, the solution is art, the “integrative” element of “imagination” that bridges these wills through the processes of empathy and understanding. Doing so, art allows individuals to recognize each other and themselves as humans.

To succeed in upholding normative freedom, Ellison needs to “to create forms in which acts, scenes and characters speak for more than their immediate selves,” (Ellison xx) speaking to what it means to be human. Literary characters, in this sense, need to form an identity, that wellspring of freedom in both its normative and justified forms. Ellison’s clearest example of accomplishing this is the yam scene in Invisible Man. Following his hospitalization, Invisible encounters a street vendor selling yams. Notably, the street vendor’s speech is colloquial, filled with slang and informal mannerisms that mark the particular culture of the salesman. Invisible, recognizing the vendor’s speech, has an epiphany. He exclaims, “to hell with being ashamed of what you liked…I am what I am!” (Ellison 266). In his exchange with the yam seller, Invisible comments on them, remarking, “They’re my birthmark…I yam what I am!” (Ellison 266). Here, he affirms his identity, “I yam what I am” as synonymous with his cultural identity, the “birthmark” of the place and culture in which he was raised. Not only is his identity formed in a particular cultural setting, it is one that he has fully integrated, something he “liked” and “always had loved” (Ellison 266). Of all types of cultural representation, the yam is perhaps most noteworthy as an item of food that is eaten – Invisible is literally integrating the cultural symbol into himself as he consumes it, reflecting his conscious integration of that experiential joy in his identity.

While the yam is still a concrete object, Ellison’s use of the yam is an instance of his general philosophy for how art uses the particular in order to capture a more intangible ideal of universality. To quote Ellison:

…the novel’s medium of communication consists in a familiar experience occurring among a particular people, within a particular society or nation….and it achieves its universality…through accumulating images of reality and arranging them in patterns of universal significance…it operates by amplifying and giving resonance to a specific complex of experience until, through the eloquence of its statement, that specific part of life speaks metaphorically for the whole. (Ellison “Society, Morality, and the Novel” 696)

The yam, like other literary images, functions as a particular image arranged in a way to achieve universal significance. The significance is not in the object but in the underlying nexus of meanings that relate to the yam. It is not solely a yam, but a yam that summons interlacing concepts of sweet food, reminders of home, and guilty pleasures, weaving a web of related thoughts that speak to such universal concepts. Likewise, Invisible’s epiphany near the end of the novel, where he burns the keepsakes he carries, is another example of the particular giving breath to the universal. Stuck underground, Invisible realizes, “to light my way out I would have to burn every paper in the brief case” (Ellison 568). Accordingly, he proceeds through his pieces: his high school diploma, Clifton’s doll, the anonymous letter, and the brotherhood name. All represent particular objects, yet all reference particular scenes, settings, people, and relationships. It is not the concrete objects that matter, which is why he burns them – it is the light that is produced. Burning is itself a chemical transformation, scientifically defined as a transformation where the identity of the object is itself altered by the change. The universal meaning becomes the metaphorical light that Invisible can produce through his experiences, a transformation of the past into an identity that gives him light to move forward. Although Invisible loses his light in that scene, it was only because he “began to scream…plunging wildly about…in [his] anger extinguishing [his] feeble light” (Ellison 568). It is the anger and violence exemplary of Bigger Thomas that quashes his light, the destructive actions inhibiting the possibility of new growth, even from memories of pain. It is anger that disconnects the particular from the universal through the dissociative power of violence, violence that threatens and therefore repels instead of integrating.

Although Ellison puts forth his particular vision for connecting literature and the universality of society, Wright makes a similar case by making Bigger Thomas a reflection of society as well. After all, in Max’s courtroom speech, he states:

Multiply Bigger Thomas twelve million times, allowing for environmental and temperamental variations, and for those Negroes who are completely under the influence of the church, and you have the psychology of the Negro people. But once you see them as a whole, once your eyes leave the individual and encompass the mass, a new quality comes into the picture. (Wright 291)

Not only does Wright, through the mouthpiece of Max, make Bigger the embodiment of “the psychology of the Negro people,” he also uses Bigger as the embodiment of all people oppressed under the forces of industrialization: “There are others, Your Honor, millions of others, Negro and white…The consciousness of Bigger Thomas, and millions of others more or less like him, white and black, according to the weight of the pressure we have put upon them, form the quicksands upon which the foundations of our civilization rest” (Wright 294). These statements make similar strokes to the claim that Ellison is making, in which the literary figure acts as the embodiment of whole peoples and nations. Unlike Ellison, however, the relation of representation is not in fulfilling a “magic…communion” of humanistic values and their universality (Ellison “Society, Morality, and the Novel” 696), but as evidence and example of the overarching structural impact of Capitalism upon society. As Max says, “once your eyes leave the individual and encompass the mass, a new quality comes into the picture,” (Wright 291) he embraces an economic attitude that views individuals merely as units in a mass, and instead looks at the abstract principles of oppression rather than the immediately meaningful elements of individual relationships. Bigger, in a sense, does not matter, since our eyes ought to “leave the individual” – he is merely a sign, merely a means of addressing the broader capitalist system. Given the discussion of freedom this paper, Wright’s argument here appears to deny Bigger his freedom. Under a normative freedom, a person must realize an identity to be free – but if Bigger as an individual is subsumed under this argument about economics, then Native Son falls short of realizing normative freedom. This might create a critical shortcoming in the literary art of Native Son.

Yet, I argue that Native Son, couched even in its naturalistic terms, aspires to present Bigger as something potentially more than what concrete forces have reduced him to. Though Max refers to Bigger as a case study of economic forces, Wright reflects on Bigger as the product of individual experiences in his essay, “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born.” Instead of describing societal forces, he describes multiple “Biggers”: a “boy who terrorized” Wright in the play yard, a “tougher…Bigger…[who] bought clothes and food on credit and would not pay for them,” a Bigger who “laughed and cursed” with a “rebellious spirit” (Wright “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born”). This time, Bigger is not used as a symptom of disease, but as a part and parcel of experience, which leans much more closely to Ellison’s argument for novel and society.

Although those statements about Bigger were not explicitly given in Native Son, there are a number of other sections where Max appeals to principles of empathy and consciousness that inspire a closer look at Bigger as a human being. In the beginning of his speech, Max makes his stand clear:

My plea is for more than one man and one people. Perhaps it is in a manner fortunate that the defendant has committed one of the darkest crimes in our memory; for if we can encompass the life of this man and find out what has happened to him, if we can understand how subtly and yet strongly his life and fate are linked to ours—if we can do this, perhaps we shall find the key to our future, that rare vantage point upon which every man and woman in this nation can stand and view how inextricably our hopes and fears of today create the exultation and doom of tomorrow (Wright 279).

His argument implores his audience to understand “the life” of Bigger Thomas, to muster the empathy necessary to link that life with ours. In effect, the claim being made is that if we – as readers, as audience members – can empathize with a man who has committed such heinous acts, then the depths of our compassion will have grown enough to reach anyone. And for all the discussion of “powerless pawns in a blind play of social forces,” (Wright 286) Max also returns to the humanistic impulses of individual identity, with the reminder: “remember that men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread! And they can murder for it, too! Did we not build a nation, did we not wage war and conquer in the name of a dream to realize our personalities and to make those realized personalities secure!” (Wright 296) Speaking of “dreams,” of “personalities,” of “Self-realization,” Wright seems to speak the same language of Ellison in appealing to the values of a human identity.

Striving to find humanity in Bigger Thomas, the references to naturalistic theories is perhaps a red herring for Native Son – it emerges from Wright’s wandering effort to find the appropriate language to articulate the underlying humanism that he shares with Ellison. In fact, literary critics point out that “Wright’s limited investment in material determinism renders his work less purely naturalistic than many believe” (Fabre, as cited in Dudley). And at numerous occasions, both inside and outside of Native Son, Wright expresses the concern that his language might not live up to the underlying feelings that he wishes to express. As Wright admits,

The more closely the author thinks of why he wrote, the more he comes to regard his imagination as a kind of self-generating cement which glued his facts together, and his emotions as a kind of dark and obscure designer of those facts. Always there is something that is just beyond the tip of the tongue that could explain it all.” (Wright “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born”)

The concept of ideas or words “just beyond the tip of the tongue” also reappears in part three of Native Son, where Bigger’s mind turns to various images of waters and the ocean. For instance:

With a supreme act of will springing from the essence of his being, he turned away from his life and the long train of disastrous consequences that had flowed from it and looked wistfully upon the dark face of ancient waters upon which some spirit had breathed and created him, the dark face of the waters from which he had been first made in the image of a man with a man’s obscure need and urge; feeling that he wanted to sink back into those waters and rest eternally (Wright 202).

Or later, after listening to the reverend, Bigger also muses upon “an endless reach of deep murmuring waters” (Wright 210). Not only do these express the similarly arduous task of reaching into the depths of humanity in order to express some transcendental meaning (which, in the latter quotation, is quite clearly expressed with religious imagery), the sheer poetic imagery of these waters, presented within the contours of Bigger’s mind, illuminate it with the life of ideas.

Ellison points out that this freedom occurs most truly when those thoughts become expressed, and Bigger does fail to speak inside the courtroom; but Bigger eventually overcomes this barrier in speaking out to Max. In the end,

And Bigger, looking at him, saw that sunshine for the first time in many days; and as he saw it, the entire cell, with its four close walls, became crushingly real…With a convulsive gasp, he bent forward and shut his eyes. It was not a white mountain looming over him now; Gus was not whistling “The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down” as he came into Doc’s poolroom to make him go and rob Blum’s; he was not standing over Mary’s bed with the white blur hovering near;—this new adversary…sapped strength and left him weak. He summoned his energies and lifted his head and struck out desperately, determined to rise from the grave, resolved to force upon Max the reality of his living.

“I’m glad I got to know you before I go!” he said with almost a shout; then was silent, for that was not what he had wanted to say. (Wright 311)

This is the epiphany moment for Bigger Thomas. This is his burning of the papers. Flashing over the fight scene with Gus, the murder of Mary, the mistaken moments of violence, Bigger overcomes the barrier of expression and speaks. Granted, he misspeaks; but he is well out of practice. Later, he more aptly communicates to Max: “You knew that I was a murderer two times over, but you treated me like a man” (Wright 311). And later on, he enacts a similar transformation when he asks Max, “Tell…. Tell Mister…. Tell Jan hello…” (Wright 316). The hesitation and transformation of “Mister” to “Jan” hearkens back to his earlier meeting with Jan in part one, where Jan refuses the title of “Mister,” insisting that Bigger recognize him as an equal. Only at the end, when persistently treated as such, does Bigger speak with the hope of recognizing and being recognized equally as a person.

And this revelation of humanity, for both Wright and Ellison, is perhaps the solution that might free society from its prejudices and injustices that prevent people from realizing what they wish they could be. Returning to the definition of normative freedom, freedom exists most fully when people can act to realize their truest, deepest desires. And that desire, as identified in the humanism of both Wright and Ellison, is the desire to be recognized as fully human. Literature helps accomplish that by growing the muscles of empathy to cement the binds between each other, to allow us to imagine beyond ourselves. And as damning a literary figure as Bigger Thomas may seem, Bigger really operates as a test of our imaginative empathy. To read the human in a character that acts so animalistic, to look at his brief moments of voice over his gaping moments of silence – perhaps that is the only way to overcome the rat race of violence that Max describes. The beginning scene with the rat is perhaps too fitting of a metaphor. Not only does the rat parallel the instinctive, fear-driven actions of Bigger once he has murdered – it also reflects the fear-driven, violent response to the metaphorical rat that is Bigger, an echoing extension of the similarly instinctive, fear-driven anger of the mob demanding Bigger’s death. More than seventy years after the publication of Native Son, events like those surrounding the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Eric Gardner, and Michael Brown reveal that this cycle of violence and fear has still not ended. The task of art and the task of humanity is to overcome that cycle, to react towards fear, not with more fear, but with understanding. If society were to finally achieve this understanding, then Wright and Ellison might agree that this society would finally be free.

Works Cited

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Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York, NY: Random House, 1995. Print.

–––, Ralph. “Society, Morality, and the Novel.” The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison. Ed.

John F. Callahan. New York, NY: The Modern Library, 2003. Online PDF.

–––, Ralph. “The World and the Jug.” The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison. Ed. John F.

Callahan. New York, NY: The Modern Library, 2003. Online PDF.

–––, Ralph. “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity.” The Collected

Essays of Ralph Ellison. Ed. John F. Callahan. New York, NY: The Modern Library, 2003. Online PDF.

Fabre, Michel. “Beyond Naturalism?” The World of Richard Wright. Jackson, MS: University of

Mississippi Press, 1985. 66-76.

Kant, Immanuel. “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View.” 1784. Tr.

Lewis White Beck. Web.

“Phantom.” Merriam-Webster Medical Dictionary. 2014. Web.

Wright, Richard. “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born.” 1 June 1940. Web.

–––, Richard. Native Son. New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1940. eBook.