Native Son, Book 3 Analysis

In the last section of Native Son, “FATE,” Wright restates the themes and prominent concepts portrayed in the novel. The most important theme is that Bigger never made any choice which resulted in his murders. He was born into a life of oppression that forced him to strike out at the force controlling him in search of a definition of life. It was fated that Bigger would kill, and now it is fated that he must die. This is most evident in lines like “Now I come to think of it, it seems like something like this just had to be.” In order to stop this problem, we do not need to set an example by kill those who try to break the bonds of oppression; we need to stop the oppression. There is a lot more to Wright’s ideals than oppression breeding hate and crime. Hate breeds hate in any situation; “the wheel of blood continues to turn;” people must recognize that others are humans like themselves, not monsters or a force of nature; “instead of men feeling that they are facing other men, they feel that they are facing mountains, floods, seas;” to be oppressed is to have an essential right of life taken away: the right to pursuit of happiness; “men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.”

Native Son sounds a warning to anyone who reads it. From the alarm that wakes Bigger on the first page, to Max’s speech in the courtroom near the end of the book, Native Son tells us: “look!, there is a problem that we are causing; let us recognize and try to solve it. The problem is not black crime; the problem is oppression that causes it.”

Wright uses a lot of complex methods to express the novel’s themes in a way that the reader can truly understand what they