Sample Literature Analysis Essay:
Study the format in which this essay is written. Observe how points are made and
backed-up with examples, how grammar is clean, how thought transitions and
sentence variation skills are used, and how the structure breaks each idea down bitby-bit. Also observe how quotations are incorporated into the essay in order to
provide substance, and how the essay performs the function of analysis and avoids
pointless summary.
The Suffocating Truth
The stark “Brrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiiinng!” (3) of an alarm clock is the first thing that we
encounter in Richard Wright’s masterpiece, Native Son. It is a ringing that startles,
resonates, and subsequently alerts us to what is perhaps the quintessential evil of human
civilization—the ubiquitous and enduring problem of racism.
Shortly after this
awakening we meet the menacing and disturbed Bigger Thomas, Wright’s embodiment
of racial oppression in American society. With these introductions, Native Son then
proceeds to take us on a horrific journey through a dystopian state so psychologically
obtuse that it rivals the horrific worlds portrayed in Orwellian fiction. But the terrible
irony of Native Son is that this American society is an all too real caricature. It is indeed,
as Wright warns in his novel, a society whose utter hatred will have the effect of
producing scores of Bigger Thomas clones who act with an almost instinctive and thirsty
penchant for violence as a means of achieving a sense of equality that would otherwise
seem impossible in America.
The Bigger Thomas that Wright offers to the reader, troubled as he is, is
nevertheless a visionary character who, through his ability to perceive contradiction,
hypocrisy, and injustice, is consumed by rage. During an early conversation with a
friend, Bigger peers at a plane soaring through the air and laments, “I could fly one of
them things if I had a chance” (16). But the America that Bigger has known would seek
to deny him of such an opportunity. Thus, the plane, which would seemingly represent
boundless freedom, to Bigger symbolizes the caged nature of his existence, and the
feelings of despair and powerlessness that envelop him. When he later remarks, “Half
the time I feel like I’m on the outside of the world peeping in through a knothole in the
fence… Sometimes I feel like something awful’s going to happen to me” (20), the image
of Bigger as one who is constantly tormented through his desire to see truth where others
prefer blindness is firmly cemented.
The incarnation of this fury is manifest through Bigger’s senseless and accidental
murder of Mary Dalton, a Communist sympathizer and privileged daughter of a
millionaire family. In essence, this accidental murder begins to take on meaning for
Bigger, as it is later pondered, “No; it was no accident, and he would never say that it
was. There was in him a kind of terrified pride” (106). Moreover, Bigger’s murder and
subsequently horrific disposal of Mary’s corpse tramples the popularized myth of
American beauty: “But to kill a millionaire’s daughter and burn her body? He smiled a
little” (113). Not only does Wright, through the actions of his protagonist, debunk the
myth of white superiority; he murders it and desecrates the corpse.
These forces that swirl about Bigger render him impotent in his capacity for selfgovernance, and as a result, instill within him a pathology through which conventional
American ethics and morality seem pointless. When Bigger, after having been sentenced
to death exclaims, “I didn’t want to kill, but what I killed for I am… It must’ve been
pretty deep in me to make me kill!” (429), the despair of the black community in the face
of racial oppression is evident. And when his lawyer Max reacts to this claim of Bigger’s
with “eyes full of terror” (429), we get the sense that what is truly terrifying to him is the
idea of what America risks becoming as a society that populates its communities with
those who, like Bigger, have been forced to view life as something that is shallow and
disposable.
Native Son is a novel of breathtaking importance because it does something
extraordinarily well—it tells the truth. After all, what is Bigger Thomas but a brutally
unflinching portrayal of American truth? He is a furious character, isolated from his
family, friends, and society. He is a murderer twice over who is sentenced to death, and
yet, he is a visionary who suffers immensely as a result of his searing insight into the
fundamental nature of mankind’s most enduring problem.
Some may wonder why
Richard Wright chose to write such a pessimistic novel. The answer is simple—when he
looked at the state of American society, he realized that amidst a torrent of hatred and
desolation he had but one ultimate truth to offer: the image of a man who gasped for truth
only to suffocate upon its fumes.