Native Son: Escape With No Way Out

Created on the basis of the life and experience of the author Richard Wright, and of his great observation, investigation and collection of the true affairs in the society, Native Son tells a story of the blacks in Chicago ghetto. Though sparking a vigorous controversy among the critics after its publication, the novel is a landmark in American literature and one of the most important American novels in the twentieth century. Escape is one of the themes of the novel. The Great Migration after the First World War can be regarded as the escape from the miserable life in the South. But the blacks had to face the same hard life in the North caused by the Great Depression. In some degree, Bigger's escape is the continuation of the escape through the Great Migration and is motivated by the second trapped condition and inhuman living environment. He escapes through fantasies, imagining flying an airplane, playing 'white' and watching movies. Bigger's fantasy that is dreamlike and ridiculous really makes him temporarily escape the real world and get satisfaction and some hope for the future. However, dream can never substitute the real world. Committing murder is Bigger's true escape. The killing of Mary Dalton and Bessie is a psychologically liberating act for Bigger. His act of murder releases immense potentialities that have been imprisoned within his personality. But these two ways are both dead ends for him. Religion and communism as two ways of escape run through the whole process of Bigger's escape. He abandons both of them. They themselves prove to be impotent in liberating the soul of the black as two ways with no egress. Social oppression and racial discrimination are the root and direct reasons for the failure of escape. The weakness of his personality also makes him fail to transform his environment. Bigger has to pay his life for the escape. The striking escape story and its tragic ending arouse the readers' further reflection of politics, economy, history and psychology that are relative to the racial problem.