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Nature Vs. Nurture In Native Son By Richard Wright

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“Son, I can’t forget you. You’re my boy. I brought you into this world” - Bigger’s Mom. The novel Native Son by Richard Wright is about a young black guy in the early/mid-1900s who struggle to fight racism while dealing with his own personal mental issues which led him to commit horrendous crimes such as murder and rape. Bigger our main character had rough childhood just because he was black but once he grew up he had a negative perspective of life, even his own people didn’t see eye to eye with him. In books 1,2, and 3 the theme is nature or nurture because the way Bigger seems to act and think is completely different from what people in his community seem to believe. The theme is if people are born with a personality and morals or if are people taught these manners and morals. …show more content…

This proves that everything that he did was nature not nurture because he always did the opposite of what she wanted him to do. According to Native Son Book 1, states, “He’s just crazy, the mother said. Just plain dumb black crazy”, that leads us the reader to believe that Bigger just followed what he was feeling he should do instead of what his mom was trying to guide him to do. This indicates that in the nature versus nurture debate, nature wins because Bigger’s Mom seems to be trying her hardest to influence him to change for the better but he doesn’t seem to learn from her, and if you can’t even learn from your own mother than who are you going to learn from. People do whatever they want to do because they were born that way, parents can try to prevent it but if they don’t put effort into becoming a better version of themselves then there’s nothing to do because that’s their nature. People are nurtured but that doesn’t guarantee that they are going to change their

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I learned that Wright forces his audiences in this case me, to enter the mind of an oppressed African American and to understand the effects of the demoralizing social conditions under which they was raised, which also reflects his own life. Wright swore to himself saying “If I wrote another book, no one would weep over it; that it could be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears” (Hart 72). He wanted people to read his book and get angry, realizing that society we know as it is, is indeed true. Barbara Foley states that Native son is “grotesque rather than tragic and Bigger ’s fate, emotionally gripping as it may be, is ultimately subordinated to Wright’s bitter social commentary”( Bloom, Richard Wright).

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