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Native Son Literary Analysis

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Life as an African American male in the 1940’s was a harsh period plagued by severe living conditions, racism, and white social dominance. Native Son is a novel that shows this through the eyes of a young black male named Bigger Thomas. The book displays Biggers life and how his cruel society has played a major role in his thought process and his overall perspective on life. Some people believe the book native son should not be read by high school students because of the violent crimes that it displays. I believe Native son should be read by high school students because it links together a fictional story and the real life situations of that time period. Native Son is a novel that follows the life of a young black mail named bigger Thomas and the various obstacles he has to overcome due to his …show more content…

The book Native son is a credible illustration that represents what it was like to live as black man in that period of time. The methods the artist used to express these struggles may have been harsh but it was in no shape or form unnecessary. Bigger throughout the story was just an afraid young man that was put in some scarce situations in which he made the wrong decision and one bad decision just lead to another. An example of this is when he accidentally killed Mary. He originally was just trying to help her to her room but when her mom walked in he panicked he ended up suffocating her on accident, and after that one bad decision just spiraled into another. This book also shows how black people assumed they were less than white people. An example of this is when Bigger and his friends started playing like they were whit because they knew they didn’t have the same opportunities as white people so they had no choice but to just act like they did in a childish

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The book was very informative of life when racism was more apparent. I think that books like this show that standing up to racism is an option. It shows that even children of a younger age were involved in the situation.

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He showed how black people were not seen as equals and how people reacted to a black person being in a white person’s territory. Both sources showed the challenge of being different. The challenge of what it’s like to live as a minority. How people can be cruel and condescending just by a person’s race and change is not easy to accept and achieve. Change is not something that can easily be accepted by everyone.

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The Nonfiction Novel, Black Boy was written By Richard Wright. In the Novel Richard uses various tools of rhetorical to convey his point of determination and aspiration while growing up as an African American boy in Jim Crow South, facing the social and economic struggles that were very stereotypical for African Americans during the time. Black Boy is about a long lived struggle of hunger for not only food, but acceptance, an understanding of the world, love and an important unappeasable hunger for knowledge. Wright is faced with daily obstacles and struggles living in poverty as he is determined to leave behind these circumstances.

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In the book our protagonist, Grant, shows clearing how society and place shapes him from day to day. In his classroom at an all black school he is the leader and is very powerful and shows no shame and back down to no one. Then when he is in the presence of white men he is automatically inferior and lets them lead. This is not only because of his personality but because of how it was the social norm for this to happen back in the 1940s. It is another disturbing and saddening case of how one race could be superior to

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Although both Richard Wright’s “Black Boy” and James Weldon Johnson’s “Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man” tell the tale of a black or not so black man facing the turmoil of segregation. There is a very distinct difference in both tales. Most notably, both men have very different living conditions and take contrasting approaches towards life. James Weldon Johnson’s “Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man” takes a very different approach on the entirety of the white or black, segregation issue that so many books have done well. Instead of telling the tale of a struggling black male, fighting to keep a job, moving from home to home as in Richard Wright’s “Black Boy”, but instead tells the side of a “white man”.

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Native Americans have always been known for their oral tales and accounts of history. This is demonstrated in the book. Firstly the writing of the book itself is an examples of this. Even though it is not an oral tale, it is still stories of people that can be passed down from generation to generation. In the books there is one person that stands out from the rest in the regard of passing on tales and traditions.

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Surviving Alone The ‘Rite of Passage’ by Richard Wright has a preeminent place in the literary world because this book teaches a lesson of survival, white power, and influence. Wright is an American author who wrote novels, poems, and short stories. He is best known for his book ‘Black Boy’ and ‘Native Son’. The book ‘Rite of Passage’ written by Richard Wright is about a 15 year old boy who has straight A’s in school and the people he has lived with all his life is not really his family, which leads to his debacle journey.

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Memos on “Notes of a Native Son” James Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son” tactfully touches on the subject of racial and cultural unrest in the United States in the 1950s. It recounts the story of James Baldwin, and his battle of tolerance and stereotypes. Throughout the work, Baldwin manages to convey societal issues through an autobiography as he shares stories from his upbringing and youth. He marks the events that would shackle him to the makeup of his race, rather than the makeup of a man. Baldwin's essay “Notes of a Native Song” demonstrates the issues of race in the 1950s by relating the moral disregard of the country to his own experiences throughout his life.

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Native Americans who have different backgrounds, childhoods, and opinions are affected differently. Reggie is a Native American who had a rough childhood with his white father, and his rage toward white people boils over when the media expresses its opinions about natives and the Indian Killer. Alexie demonstrates how the people of the race represented are affected in a spectrum, with some natives’ views changing such as Marie, to other natives turning violent and brutally attacking people, such as Reggie. Truck’s reckless words on Native Americans and Wilson’s novels had the consequences of severe racial tensions between Native Americans and white people. Since the

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In his book the Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie portrays a teenage boy, Arnold Spirit (junior) living in white man’s world, and he must struggle to overcome racism and stereotypes if he must achieve his dreams. In the book, Junior faces a myriad of misfortunes at his former school in ‘the rez’ (reservation), which occurs as he struggles to escape from racial and stereotypical expectations about Indians. For Junior he must weigh between accepting what is expected of him as an Indian or fight against those forces and proof his peers and teachers wrong. Therefore, from the time Junior is in school at reservation up to the time he decides to attend a neighboring school in Rearden, we see a teenager who is facing tough consequences for attempting to go against the racial stereotypes.

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The Novel shows first hand white man cruelty to Navajo, but in return the Navajos use their sacred language to win the war. Being sent away to a strange school was expressed as an honor, when the soon to be Ned Begay arrived, it seemed pleasant. The individuals were greeted in their own language, and brought inside. Later to be striped of their heritage. The Whites spoke only english punished for all things That pertained to their language.

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Why do we read this? Connie Willis touches on this thought in her novel Passage. Willis states, "That's what literature is. " It’s the people who go before us, tapping out messages from the past, from beyond the grave, trying to tell us about life and death! Listen to them.

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Native Son is regarded as a third person restricted narrative situation. The voice of the central character, Thomas Bigger. The others are the flat characters because they do not shift in the novel, just Bigger who is considered as the effective character. while white communities may think as foil characters because they are the enemy of Bigger. The manner or technique of writing in this novel leads readers to be close to the novel, especially to the protagonist.

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800 Words | 4 Pages

Black Boy Book Review Richard Wright begins his biography in 1914 with a story of his never-ending curiosity and need to break the rules. Although this biography only extends through the early years of his life, Wright manages to display the harsh world that a black member of society faced in the South during the time of the Jim Crow laws. Wright explains the unwritten customs, rules and expectations of blacks and whites in the south, and the consequences faced when these rules are not followed strictly.

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financial and social situation. He knew that they were stuck in this predicament solely because of their race. A typical stereotype of the black population is used in this novel as a strong theme to rely on to convey Wright’s message to his reader. With Bigger’s mother being a single poor mother in the city with a father out of the picture is leads to conflict between the family and between bigger and himself. Masaya Takeuchi in Bigger’s Divided Self Violence and Homosociality in ‘Native Son’ says that, “ Bigger’s love for his father we might suspect, is mixed with unconscious resentment for abandoning Bigger to the mercy of an oppressive white society and to the emasculating criticism of his mother,...”

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