The Natural Symbols of Native Son

Let me preface with this; I'm a sucker for symbolism. I feel I've done a touch too many assignments on the topic during my academic career, but with so many books just brimming with it, how can one resist!

Native Son is, in my view, a very dichotomous book with various binary forces converging all at once. White and black, rich and poor, man and woman, communism and capitalism, life and death, fear and control, the list goes on. For a book driven by simplified, powerful forces such as these, symbolism becomes all the more effective in conveying its themes. Often times in this particular novel, one will find these allusions in the environment Wright creates for Bigger, going along with the naturalism we've discussed of him. So let's take a look!

One of Wright's favorite symbols in Native Son is the simplest of them all; color. Repeatedly, Wright barrages readers with decidedly black and white imagery, objects, and scenes to represent the racial root of Bigger's problems and anxieties. Especially in book two, where his fear reaches several climaxes, Wright unnecessarily (?) adds increasing figures that are either black or white. Take the first couple pages of Flight. He sees Mary's "black purse", looks at his blade with its "dried ridges of black blood", grips a pamphlet in his "black fingers" which at the bottom has a "black and white picture of a hammer and curving knife" as well as a "white hand clasping a black hand" (98). All of that is on the SAME PAGE, the second page of book two! Maybe I'm as paranoid as Bigger, but I don't think I'd always describe a purse, blood, my fingers, and a picture with their respective color in such quick succession of one another. The list goes on; the Dalton's snowy Chicago estate looms "white and silent" (116). As he puts Mary's corpse into the furnace, he sees a "white cat" staring back at him (91).He sees Mrs Dalton the day after the murder "dressed in white, her pale face as it had been when she was standing in the darkness", with "eyes almost as white as her face and her hair and her dress" (127, 128). It goes along with his perception of white people as a "force", creeping closer to Bigger's inevitable demise (114). Perhaps Bigger puts it best for showing how this form of  symbolism gets to the origin of his dilemmas:

"(...) she would not want to hear him tell of how drunk her daughter had been. After all, he was black and she was white. He was poor and she was rich." (128).

In tandem with these tinted reminders of Bigger's racial struggle and conflict, several scenes in the novel either predestine the protagonist or take on new symbolic meaning. The first scene of Native Son  starts us off with some solid foreshadowing. In a stressful opening, Bigger Thomas and Family wake up to a nasty rat invading their dingy household. In sum, Bigger chases around the rat with a skillet until the rat, with all escape holes covered up by Bigger,  bares "long yellow fangs" out of fear, with his "belly quivering", until Bigger smashes it with a shoe. This quite obviously mirrors the ending episode of Book Two, with Bigger as the rat, and the massive encroaching white police force, or even just white society in general as Bigger. Both are backed into inescapable corners, and out of crushing fear and desperation, react with violence. Even the disgusted monikers the Thomas family give the rat ("Gee, he's a big bastard", "sonofabitch could cut your throat") later remind us of the brutish negative remarks given by the white members of Bigger's trial towards him in Book Three.

My other favorite example would have to be the case of the furnace. It's very brief, but in Bigger's interactions with the furnace, it seems to have a curse-like effect on him, possibly as a consequence of his guilt. For one, after he puts Mary there, almost every time he comes down to the furnace with others, he always thinks about killing them. He hatches the idea of murdering the white cat that sees him pouring Dalton's body into the furnace before he remembers that "cats can't talk" (91). He even thinks about murdering Peggy when she comes down with him the next morning, though she never even looks into the furnace. When Mr. Dalton comes down into the basement and finds out that Mary did not in fact go to school yesterday, the awkward silence between them is filled with mention that "the furnace droned" in the background, and again when he explains Jan exploits to Britten, and as both are immediately after Bigger lies to someone, it seems that the ghost of Mary Dalton is beckoning for attention at the site of her cremation (165, 166). Finally, a bit after he delivers the ransom note, he approaches the furnace and his body is overtaken with dread:

"A strange sensation enveloped him. Something tingled in his stomach and on his scalp. His knees wobbled, giving way. He stumbled to the wall and leaned against it weakly. A wave of numbness spread fanwise from his stomach over his entire body, including his head and eyes, making his mouth gap. Strength ebbed from him. He sank to his knees and pressed his fingers to the floor to keep from tumbling over. And organic sense of dread seized him. His teeth chattered and he felt sweat sliding down his armpits and back. He groaned, holding as still as possible, His vision was blurred; but gradually it cleared. Again he saw the furnace. Then he realized he had been on the verge of collapse. Soon the glare and drone of the fire came to his eyes and ears." (185)

So yeah. I think I'll just let that paragraph speak for itself. The description evokes a dominating force guilt and anguish, coming back to bite him for his horrible crime, just when he thought he could game the system. This particular passage really won me over to the powers of symbolism in this book. But hey, call me on my comprehensive B.S if you think I'm a whackjob for all this. Or agree with me, that's always fine too.