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Native Son Rhetorical Analysis

Decent Essays

In Richard Wright’s novel Native Son, the protagonist, Bigger Thomas, lives in a world where he is constantly limited by the color of his skin; through his actions and through his words, Bigger proves that hatred is often derived from fear and misunderstanding, ultimately leading to the kind of treachery that sends a person to the ninth level of Hell. Living in 1930s Chicago, Bigger Thomas, like most other blacks living in the United States during the time, was fearful and envious of the privileged whites he saw driving around in their nice cars and residing in their large estates. Bigger spoke to his gang about his envious thoughts, saying, “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 20). He felt as if he had been living in a jail …show more content…

Out of these four types of betrayals, Bigger Thomas committed two. One in his lying to the Dalton family and killing their daughter, Mary, and a second because when he committed such offences against the Daltons, he also betrayed his family due to the fact that he was the man of the household and was expected to provide for his family, which he failed to do when he murdered two innocent women and was then executed. When he accidentally smothered Mary in her sleep, Bigger immediately panicked, and his first thought was to hide the body. Finally deciding to put her body in the furnace so there would be no evidence of her even coming home from a gala, he then had to behead the corpse in order to make it fit into the opening. Bigger had said that he had never felt more alive than before, as if finally acting on his impulses freed him from the prison he had been living in for so long. The fact that he felt no remorse for killing her revealed just how vicious of a person he had become, or even that he had always been, because of the racism that ruled his

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