I read this for this year's Book Riot Read Harder Challenge.
This was my entry for "Read a classic by an author of color." I highly recommend it. I'm also studying the performance of justice in fiction and how it's skewed along color lines. Native Son definitely digs deep into that. ( )

I don't have any qualms calling this a masterpiece, despite the rough start I had with it.

Honestly, this book is reminiscent of so many books that I absolutely love. It's similar to Dostoyevksi and Kafka in the sense of wallowing in anxious misery and self loathing (I'm a sucker for a good story about anxious misery and self loathing). Similar to Invisible Man for it's examination of the racial divide and themes of black identity. Similar to to The Stranger, for it's plot and structure.

It is a brilliant critique on the racial divide in America. Excellently paced. Despite the dense themes, and unsympathetic protagonist, this book was an engaging page turner, and kept me on the edge of my seat. I'm not ashamed to admit I lost sleep over it a few nights, with empathetic anxiety.

I'd recommend it to anyone, with the caveat that the first 30 or so pages are a bit rough, but push through. ( )

(34) My zeal for classic fiction has waned, but I still endeavor to be well-read and tackle several works of literature deemed to be influential, and/or highly regarded every year. My social justice lens has become cracked and soiled as of late so I am doing my best to read or re-read work by black authors. I realize that while I have read many novels by Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, I have virtually read nothing by black male writers. So, 'Native Son,' a gripping tale of a poor black boy from the the Deep South transplanted to the slums of South Side Chicago - Bigger Thomas. He gets a job as a chauffeur for a do-good rich white family... and let's just say, it doesn't end well.

The beginning of the book is horrifying and burned in my brain. Aah! The furnace. The hatchet. Why? Oh God.. it is tragic. The scene with he and Bessie in the abandoned tenement and the raging blizzard outside was equally as dramatic. His icy travails over the rooftops of Chicago. I couldn't put the novel down for quite sometime. But after Bigger got arrested the book went downhill. I feel that Wright then began to explain ad nauseam using unrealistic scenes such as having everyone he ever knew in his life visit him in jail at the same time; and loong speeches by his lawyer Max. The book became a chore and less convincing. I could feel why Bigger behaved as he did, not sure I needed to be told. His writing for the first half of the novel spoke for itself.

I hated it for Bigger. He never had a chance. And I get that plenty of people grow up with even worse adversity and make something of their lives. Not everyone would choose to do what he did. But still. You can see it in the eyes of inner city black boys and rural white ones that get a shitty education surrounded by embittered adults who live shitty little lives - boredom, hopelessness, rage. A worthy read that is one half gripping, one half slog. ( )

A native of poverty and having learned to survive on the streets gets a job for a rich family, has his luck changed? Native Son by Richard Wright tells the story of Bigger Thomas, a black youth living in a poor area of 1930s Chicago South Side.

Even with an introductory warning, this novel begins in a harsh mood with unlikeable characters and doesn’t improve as the narrative continues and more characters appear. Bigger is a thug other thugs look down on, which while Wright’s intention doesn’t take away the fact the reader has to deal with this character for roughly 430 pages even with a few near misses of sympathy. Of Bigger’s two victims, his girlfriend Bessie is frankly the better character than Mary Dalton as the latter is a foolish white knight that talks in “code” believing every black person would know said code. The only character that is anyway decent is Bigger’s lawyer Boris Max that is the primary character in the third part of the book, even though he’s idealistic he’s smart enough to face reality by knowing Bigger has only 0.001% of staying alive and does everything he can against the odds to do so. Personally Max comes off as a surrogate for the author than Bigger does, which is why that particular character comes off as the best one in the book.

Native Son is a controversial yet well-known novel and is Richard Wright’s best fictional work, but as soon as I started reading it, I hated everyone in it. ( )

If I look at Native Son simply as a novel, it is a good one, inspired by Crime and Punishment, but set in the context of racial segregation in Depression-era Chicago. The crux of the plot is a murder committed involuntarily by a young African American, Bigger Thomas, out of fear of being found with a young white woman, Mary, in her bedroom, and the prevailing psychological mood of resentment at racial injustice, segregation, hostility, and contempt is compelling. But if I look at the novel as a message, I do not know quite how to take it. Richard Wright wrote with the intention of telling readers "what had made [Bigger] and what he meant." His explanation would have been easier to grasp had he written a straightforward protest novel about an innocent victim. The trouble is that Bigger is so malicious, and therefore the suggestion that racism made him what he was is so much harder to accept. He sexually assaults Mary; he feels sexualized misogynism towards Bessie, and rapes and murders her; he plots to get ransom money for the woman he has already killed and hidden; he experiences having murdered a white woman as catharsis for the racism the white world has shown towards him (e.g. "It was not Mary he was reacting to when he felt that fear and shame. Mary had served to set off his emotions, emotions conditioned by many Marys. And now that he had killed Mary he felt a lessening of tension in his muscles; he had shed an invisible burden he had long carried"; e.g. "He looked ... round at the white faces near him. He wanted suddenly to stand up and shout, telling them that he had killed a rich white girl..."; e.g. "In all of his life these two murders were the most meaningful thing that had ever happened to him. He was living, truly and deeply ... never had his will been so free.") Wright seems to be saying that racial segregation could make a person not just depressed, bitter, angry, rebellious, militant, or despondent... but evil. "He had been so conditioned in a cramped environment that hard words or knocks alone knocked him upright or made him capable of action--action that was futile because the world was too much for him. It was then that he closed his eyes and struck out blindly, hitting what or whom he could, not looking or caring what or who hit back."

How does a reader handle Wright's apparent message that racism could drive an African American man to feel murder of a white woman as a self-actualizing accomplishment? What do we do with a novel that brilliantly announces the psychological experience of racism, but then goes so far in its picture of racism's impact that it seems like a drastic indictment of its victims as teetering on the edge of psychopathy? If racism did that to a person, then what was Wright saying about African Americans? Hence reactions like this one from writer David Bradley. First his early take on the book: "Suddenly I realized that many readers of 'Native Son' had seen Bigger Thomas as a symbol; in 1940, when 'Native Son' hit the shelves, they ... had probably never come into enough contact with blacks to know better. God, I thought, they think we're all Biggers." Then his evolved take: even if the novel should not be taken as a sociological report, "[i]t reminds us of a time in this land of freedom when a man could have this bleak and frightening vision of his people, and when we had so little contact with one another that that vision could be accepted as fact." He could not accept Bigger's character or its genesis as a realistic picture of the African American experience, and thereby drew this response from Wright's daughter excoriating him as a denialist: "We all have a Bigger Thomas crouching within us, although there are those, like Mr. Bradley, who need to kill Bigger on paper rather than recognize him as part of their own darkness. Mr. Bradley segregates Bigger in the farthest corner of his mind, denies him, projects him outward and lynches him. But haven't we discovered that the outward projection of shadows within is the very foundation of segregationist thought?"

It is hard to go all the way with Wright. Bigger's advocate tells the court at his trial: "Every hope is a plan for insurrection. Every glance of the eye is a threat. His very existence is a crime against the state." Here we are in the realm of social protest. But the defense, such as it is, goes on: "He was impelled toward murder as much through the thirst for excitement, exultation, and elation as he was through fear! It was his way of living!" and "Is love possible to the life of a man I've described to this Court? . . . The circumstances of his life and [Bessie's] would not allow it." This is beyond protest; it is exposing how inhumanity has made the victim inhumane. Are we to accept Wright's picture of a man's mind under racism so far as to believe that its victims are so warped by it as to exult in murder and be incapable of love? If so, this novel may constitute the deepest of all protests against racism. ( )