The Duality Of Biggers Consciousness Essays Examples

In the white and black world that Wright draws inspiration from, one is confronted with the ‘Bigger’ personality who is attracted and repelled at the same time in the American scene. He is a native son of the land, and that is why Wright asserts that he belonged, but he did not belong because of his Negro descent, at least when looking at him from a white perspective. Bigger is dual in aspect because he is good and bad at the same time. He was good when he elicited pride in his fellow Negroes, “The Negroes experienced an intense flash of pride and the streetcar moved on its journey without incident.” While the whites could retort, “That's that Bigger Thomas nigger and you'd better leave 'im alone." There was a sign of defeat and victory experienced by both groups. Bigger was a Negro nationalist because he helped in raise awareness of the superiority and inferiority experienced by the American society at the time.
The Jim Crow rules used during the black and white segregation era depicted blacks as inferior human beings. And in this context, Bigger is depicted as an individual who had intense hatred for white people and so could not belong there and also, did not fit in the context of his fellow Negroes because of his attitude. It is not explainable why there is a part that whites and blacks did not seem to agree on. This is the part that id depicted in the character Bigger because there are those who never liked him in the Negro community, for instance, Bigger 1. There is also the Bigger that is admired by the Negroes, but hated in equal measure by the whites, Bigger 5. Bigger is an American product and that is why he is called a native son, but the system does not treat him as such.
Wright also talks of a ‘vast, muddied pool of human life in America’. He began to see deeper into the lives of men, and that is when he realized that there was more to Bigger that the differences existing between whites and Negroes. There are several Bigger Thomases in other parts of the world, like “Bigger in America and Bigger in Nazi Germany and Bigger in old Russia”. But then there are the hopes and dreams of all these Biggers that to enjoy freedom and liberties crafted in the law. Bigger was not allowed to live and enjoy his freedoms an equal member of the American society. When he engages in unspeakable acts, he just represents the feelings of millions of others who would rather suffer in silence than risk their lives.
There are the political realities shown through Bigger’s life as he faced the North and South. The effects of the actions are reflected in all Negroes because it forms part of their history. The oppression the wider Negro community went through and split Bigger from them and neither could he fit either side of the divide. All o them are victims of a nasty past but then, there is dualism in his life, as an American and as a Negro, and this is represented by the actions of whites towards Negroes and the treatment between Negros themselves. But then Bigger lives “dangerously, taking his life into his hands, accepting what life had made him.”