Native Son: Stream of Consciousness 3 key examples

Bigger's imagination goes many places as the film goes on. First, he imagines his life working for the Daltons. He thinks about living with rich white people with a "sense of excitement." He considers how he can act like them: "It was all a game and white people knew how to play it." In this moment of imagination, Bigger introduces a theme that will be important to the rest of the novel. Bigger (and, the reader assumes, Wright) sees racism as a structural fact that overrules people's lives, not as individual actions that people take. Life is a "game" and racism is just one of its rules; "white people," Bigger astutely realizes, "knew how to play it," as the hard reality of racism benefits them and hurts him.

Bigger's stream of consciousness also foreshadows later parts of Book One. At this point, Bigger has heard of Mary but knows little about her. As he imagines living with her, he makes guesses about her personality: she might be a "hot kind of girl" who "had a secret sweetheart." Bigger, of course, turns out to be exactly correct, to Mary's great misfortune. Thus, the stream of consciousness includes foreshadowing to Mary's personality and, indirectly, to the cause of her death. Bigger also, though, imagines the future incorrectly. As he thinks to himself, he criticizes himself for his behavior: "He was a fool for wanting to rob Blum's just when he was about to get a good job." But this certainly does not foreshadow his experience at his "good job." Bigger's desire to do crime and cause violence  ("wanting to rob Blum's"), even if it is not his fault or guided by emotions beyond his control, certainly does not go away, even after he gets his "good job."

Then, at last, Bigger turns his attention to the movie again. He hasn't followed the plot of the film, and as he looks at the screen, the narrator remarks on "the screams of black men and women dancing free and wild, men and women who were adjusted to their soil and at home in the world." Bigger was too busy imagining his life and the racism that controls it to see the film in front of him, showing scenes of Black liberation, sovereignty, and joy. After this, Jack finally speaks again, and the narrative fully leaves Bigger's head and returns to the real world.

Leopold and Loeb's plan was to tell the family's parents that they kidnapped the boy and to ask for ransom money. The case was nationally famous for its brutality and melodrama, and especially for its trial, in which the famous lawyer Clarence Darrow served as counsel for the defense. His closing argument—which distinctly resembles much of Max's rhetoric in the court scenes in Book 3—argued against the death penalty as immoral in all cases. It is seen as a foundational document in the movement against capital punishment.

Bessie would have been a young girl presumably living in Chicago at the time of the Leopold and Loeb murders, 16 years before the events of Native Son. She is familiar with the case, but Bigger, who grew up in Mississippi, is not. When Bessie hears that the Dalton house, where Bigger has begun working, is in Hyde Park, she recalls that the Franks family lived in the same area. The University of Chicago, where Leopold and Loeb were students, is also in the neighborhood. She tells Bigger about the murder and fake ransom. But Bigger, upon hearing that those murderers tried to make money from the affair, becomes immediately distracted:  

"The ones who killed the boy and then tried to get money from the boy's family....

Cite this Quote

....by sending notes to them Bigger was not listening. The world of sound fell abruptly away from him and a vast picture appeared before his eyes, a picture teeming with so much meaning that he could not react to it all at once. [...] He said nothing, how come you won't listen when I talk to you Why couldn't he, why could he not, send a letter to the Daltons, asking for money? Bigger He sat up in bed, staring into the darkness, what's the matter honey He could ask for ten thousand, maybe twenty.

As a literary device, this is a very explicit version of stream of consciousness. Wright clearly depicts the movement from the real world and Bessie's conversation to Bigger's thoughts, as he becomes entirely distracted by the prospect of such a windfall. Some of Bessie's statements slip through, but the narrative follows Bigger's imagination. This allows the whole affair of the ransom note to be much more justified. The reader may understand that 10,000 dollars would be hugely helpful to Bigger, but only through the stream of consciousness can the reader see how utterly enraptured Bigger is at the possibility of such financial freedom. Indeed, Bigger's imagination of a life without poverty was "a picture teeming with so much meaning," impossible to describe in any other way than by showing the reader Bigger's thoughts. 

Bigger's vision of Genesis carries on through the making of the earth, the creation of animals, the creation of humans, and finally with Adam and Eve in Garden of Eden, when "out of the clouds came a voice saying eat not of the fruit of the tree in the midst of the garden, neither touch it, lest ye die ..." (Thus Wright is alluding to Genesis books 1 and 2; all of the direct quotations, set in italics, are from the King James Version.) Bigger, in prison and close to death, imagines his creation and remembers his original sin. 

This is a sterling example of Wright's skill in depicting Bigger's mind, a feature throughout the book. The reader experiences with Bigger the same beautiful, cosmic images that flow smoothly into one another, punctuated by the words of God. Bigger's visions include, without doubt, some of Wright's most aesthetically wondrous images: "the earth grew grass and trees and flowers that gave off seed that fell to the earth to grow again and the earth was lit by the light of a million stars." This is one of the most experimental and modernist passages in the book, as Wright carefully evokes Bigger's altered mental state through his religious hallucination.

This hallucination is tied into the themes from the rest of the book. Bigger, in his hallucination, tries to reimagine, not for the first time in the novel, a new world where he can be born pure and sinless. Bigger spends a lot of time thinking about the inevitable racist structures of society that control his life; his imagination of Genesis is so rich because he has often been thinking about remaking his own life. He thinks to himself, later on the same page, how he created such a new world after he murdered Mary, when his worldview changed to one of action and rebellion: "To live, he had created a new world for himself, and for that he was to die." Wright uses Genesis as an analog for Bigger's desire for a new world. But it is another instance of Wright's penchant for irony in biblical allusion that Bigger experiences this vision of Genesis in a prison hospital, convicted of the greatest sin of murder, where he will soon either die of his injuries or be executed.