Native Son: Motifs 3 key examples

Each time Wright uses this phrase it is nearly identical. First, in Book 1, Bigger smokes while walking around, questioning whether he should take the job at the Daltons: "With his hands deep in his pockets, another cigarette slanting across his chin, he brooded and watched the men at work across the street." Later in Book 1, as Bigger walks around with Gus, they smoke together, and Wright emphasizes the contrast of colors: "They leaned their backs against the redbrick wall of a building, smoking, their cigarettes slanting across their white chins." Later, in Book 2, the image returns again when Bigger, on the run from the police, steals a newspaper but sees a man inside the drug store "who was looking at [Bigger], a cigarette slanting whitely across his black chin." His chin is the only stated feature that identifies this man as Black.

Wright is a careful writer, especially around images of blackness and whiteness, so the repetition of this image is no coincidence. This is, for one thing, quite a novel and perhaps unrealistic description of smoking. This is reason for the image in itself: the fresh description is compelling to read. The slanting lines across a black chin recall Cubism, then a recent art movement, defined by sharply delineated shapes. Wright, in other words, is not using a cliche, but inventing an aestheticized way to describe smoking. The slant of white across a black chin, as well, is another of the many black-and-white images in the novel, which have a number of different effects. The world of Native Son is often dry, deterministic, colorless; Wright often paints in only black-and-white to depict this. The slanting cigarettes are one of the most consistent and fresh examples of this method.

When Bigger wakes up in Book 1, anything is possible; the reader knows nothing of his story yet. It begins with an alarm clock: "Brrrrrriiiiiiiinnnnnng! An alarm clock clanged in the dark and silent room." In Book 2, Bigger wakes up a murderer, and is filled with energy and fear: "It seemed to Bigger that no sooner had he closed his eyes than he was wide awake again, suddenly and violently, as if someone had grabbed his shoulders and shaken him." In Book 3, Bigger's sleep gets still more fitful. The first sentence of the third book reacts against the first two. Bigger slips in and out of sleep, as the third book overturns the day-per-book structure: "There was no day for him now, and there was no night; there was but a long stretch of time, a long stretch of time that was very short; and then—the end."

These repeated sentences keep the whole novel grounded in Bigger's physical body. What separates the book, structurally, are the moments when Bigger's deeply complex mental life stops and his biological need for sleep takes over. This is an especially effective structure in Native Son, in which Wright carefully and extensively describes Bigger's imagination. Even for a book that exists so thoroughly inside one character's head, material concerns of day, night, and sleep still reign supreme.

This focus on the head starts soon after the murder, before Bigger even writes the fake ransom note. He has come to terms with his crimes, but "there was only one thing that worried him: he had to get that lingering image of Mary's bloody head lying on those newspapers from before his eyes." Just after this, as Bigger cleans the snow off the Buick the morning after the murder, he sees "before his eyes an image of Mary, her bloody neck just inside the furnace and her head with its curly black hair lying upon the soggy newspapers." Later, as Bigger visits Bessie's apartment and they formulate their plan, he still cannot get Mary out of his mind: "She was teasing him and he liked it. At least it took him away from that terrible image of Mary's head lying on the bloody newspaper." Later, as the newspapermen search for Mary's bones in the furnace, Bigger has another violent hallucination of Mary: "What's he looking at? Bigger's muscles twitched. He wanted to run to the man's side and see what he was looking at; he had in his mind an image of Mary's head lying there bloody and unburnt before the man's eyes."

The most extreme example of the effect of Mary's head on Bigger's psyche is a dream that he has while fitfully sleeping with Bessie. Clearly, the head has struck him with delusional fear:

He stood on a street corner in a red glare of light like that which came from the furnace and he had a big package in his arms so wet and slippery and heavy that he could scarcely hold onto it and he wanted to know what was in the package and he stopped into an alley corner and unwrapped it and the paper fell away and he saw—it was his own head—his own head lying with black face and half-closed eyes and lips parted with white teeth showing and hair wet with blood and the red glare grew brighter like light shining down from a red moon and red stars on a hot summer night.

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Perhaps it is obvious that decapitating Mary would upset Bigger so much that he starts having dreams of his own head coming off. In a book full of outlandish acts of violence that come to seem almost unavoidable in the circumstances, the beheading is the most outlandish. And, as a result, the gruesome image of Mary's head sticks with Bigger throughout the novel.