A Dialogue Theory Interpretation Of Native Son

Native Son is one of the representative works of the black American writer, Richard Wright. It was one of the earliest successful attempts to disclose the racial discrimination in America in regard to the hostile social environment and conditions imposed on African-Americans by the dominant white society. In Native Son, Richard Wright criticized the hypocrisy of the capitalists and the ugliness of the capitalistic society.Mikhail Bakhtin was a renowned Russian philosopher, literary critic, literary theorist and language philosopher. He introduced the concept of dialogism in his major work Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics for the first time in 1929. Bakhtin believes that dialogue is the premise of the world. For him, all languages and thoughts appear as dialogic. He argues that the nature of human life and consciousness is dialogic and dialogue is a means of existence. He insists that the center of the novel’s artistic world must lay dialogue. In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, he pointed out that the whole novel is a "great dialogue". Within the "great dialogue", there lies "micro-dialogues" which determines the peculiar personalities of the characters in the novel.The aim of the thesis is to have a dialogue theory interpretation of Native Son and reveal its dialogic nature. Through the great-dialogue and micro-dialogue interpretation of the novel, the conclusion is easy to be drawn that all the dialogic elements of Native Son contributes to the theme-the criticism of the serious racism in American Society and the whole novel is a dialogic artistry. Moreover, as dialogue is the means of the existence of Human Beings, the dialogue interpretation of Native Son helps reveal that Native Son is a philosophical unity.