NS Intro Q&A #2!

Here's my answer for the second question:

Analyze the following quote from the introduction to Native Son, written by Richard Wright:

From these items I drew my first political conclusions about Bigger: I felt that Bigger, an American product, a native son of this land, carried within him the potentialities of either Communism or Fascism. I don’t mean to say that the Negro boy I depicted in Native Son is either a Communist or a Fascist. He is not either. But he is product of a dislocated society; he is a dispossessed or disinherited man; he is all of this, and he lives amid the greatest possible plenty on earth and he is looking and feeling for a way out.

I believe that what Wright is saying about Bigger is that Bigger, being a person born and raised on American soil but also oppressed by so many others born and raised on American soil, has or will eventually acquire the rebellious nature and the personality needed to break social boundaries.  Much like how the much-oppressed Russian peasants came together, drove the czar out of power, and established the communist state of Soviet Russia, Bigger has the potential to be part of a great movement.  This will ultimately become the Civil Rights Movement.  Bigger is also searching for equality among all people, something that Germany’s Nazis strove for.  Perhaps only Bigger’s goal stemmed from racial oppression, but both his and the Nazis’ arose out of poverty.  The Jews in pre-Nazi Germany had abundant wealth and prosperity, things that most middle-class Germans did not, most likely would not ever, but wanted to have.  In Bigger’s world, he sees that all white people have everything they could possibly ask for: better homes, better clothes, better food, and better education, just to name a few.  He sees all this, and he wants to have it.  This is Bigger’s potential to become a communist.  A fascist is basically a dictator, and I believe that Wright writes that Bigger has the potential to become a dictator because if Bigger does get wealth and prosperity, his anger and emotions he felt before would lead him to think that it is fair and just and possibly even right to oppress whites.

Lovelovelove, Maria(: