Richard Wright's Native Son And Its New Black Hero

Richard Wright is considered a figure as milestone in the history of Afro-American literature and one of American most highly respected spokesmen for Black problems and the oppressed black American in the late 1930s and 1940s. In 1940 the appearance of Native Son made literary history. From its publication in 1940 to the present, Native Son has sparked a vigorous critical debate involving a wide variety of critics who have approached the novel from many revealing perspectives.Among the different criticisms on Native Son, many critics pay attention to the profound theme and the delicate description and analysis of the hero's psycho in the characterization, but there are few critics who make thorough study on it, especially in China. The writer has tried to provide, for the first time, mainly by the psychological approach, a full- length analysis of the various aspects of the novel's form and its artistic techniques in the characterization of the hero that make Native Son remarkable.Part One is a general introduction to Richard Wright and his novel Native Son. It briefly introduces the life of Wright, his position in the literary field, the plot, the source, the literaryreview of Native Son, it also points out the significance of the thesis.Part Two is a separate study of the various aspects of the novel's form that constitute anorganic unity that helps Wright to recreate human experience on many levels. Point of view personalizes and intensifies the novel's ideas by pushing them through the central character's unique consciousness. The setting establishes a physically substantial world that strongly arouses all the readers' senses. As we have seen, the setting also has emotional value, for it is often used brilliantly as a reflector of Digger's deepest feelings. The novel's structure also enriches the hero in the novel, as it reveals the hero's inward growth from the scenes that make simple ideas reverberate against one another, and thus helps to create a richer, more delicate image. The characterization reveals that Wright simplifies the characters surrounding Bigger to highlight the intricacies of Bigger's personality and his achievement of selfhood. Through the analysis of the theme, it reveals the revolutionary new content that the society of racial segregation anddiscrimination has created and should be responsible for the tragedy of Bigger Thomas and results in people's morbid psychology. It also reveals that the novel's main theme consists of a complex interplay of the two ideas, the deterministic vision of life and the free will.In Part Three, the writer has paid special attention to the use of the techniques such as psychological description and figurative language in the novel. The psychological description reveals Digger's paradoxical interior life and the intricacies of his personality that make him at once good and evil, proud and shameful, fearful and defiant, awful and awesome, frustrated and hopeful. And figurative language in the novel is also used to depict Bigger's ambiguous character and further highlight the discrepancy between Bigger's perception of himself and the view of him held by others.Part Four is a conclusion of the thesis. Through the detailed analysis, especially through the analysis of the use of the psychoanalysis and figurative language, the writer finds that Native Son is a masterwork because its formal artistry and its revolutionary new content are solidly integrated to produce a complex and resonant vision of modern American reality. Bigger emerges as a rebellious, prideful, temperamental, challenging new black hero quite different from the mild and humble Uncle Tom. The emergence of Bigger shows that American racial consciousness has reached a new level and forces the whole society to take racial problem into serious consideration. Thomas Bigger, Therefore, has become another typical image in American Literature and another word standing for individual consciousness of Black people.