Bigger And His Fear, Flight And Fate Essay, Research Paper

An ancient Grecian myth has been told for centuries about a male child who lives in fright. Icarus had been forced to populate his life imprisoned until one twenty-four hours he had the chance to get away. He had been provided with a brace of wax wings with which he could fly his capturer. He took advantage of these wings and set canvas. While in flight off from the prison, he discovered the joy and excitement that came with freedom. The male child challenged the wings and voyaged higher and closer to the hot Sun. Soon plenty, his wings melted and he perished in the huge sea. This narrative has served as a repeating subject in modern literature.

In the early 1940 s, acclaimed writer, Richard Wright wrote his chef-d’oeuvre Native Son. This fresh trades with many of the same metaphorical thoughts that foremost arose in the Grecian myth. Wright s supporter, Bigger, was a immature Afro-american adult male who had been oppressed all his life by the white racialist society which surrounded him. Much like Icarus, Bigger discovered a fatal manner to let go of himself from his captive life. And, like Icarus, Bigger besides challenged his freedom and failed. Wright splits Bigger s narrative into three chapters, Fear, Flight and Fate. Each is important to Bigger s journey through life.

Throughout the first subdivision of the fresh Bigger lives his life in fright. He fears the white adult male, the constabulary, faith, love and most significantly, being known as a coward. Bigger s friend Gus provinces during an statement with Bigger You naming me scared so nobody ll see how frightened you is! ( 29 ) Bigger reacts by jumping at him with purposes to bring down hurting. Bigger responds this manner to all of his frights. To screen himself from the recognition of failing, he deals with his frights through force. His eyes red with choler and fright, his fists clenched and held stiffly to his side. ( 28 ) The reader observes one of Bigger s violent Acts of the Apostless during the first scene of the novel, when he viciously smashes a rat with a frying pan. His force escalates as the chapter goes on. He and his friends plan to rob a delicatessen ; nevertheless, Bigger is dying due to the fact that the proprietor is a white owner. He decides to undermine the robbery. Bigger picks a battle with Gus by endangering him with a knife. His scheme plants and the robbery is aborted. Finally, at the terminal of the chapter, Bigger commits slaying while caught in a frenetic state of affairs with the bibulous girl of his white employer. While in her room, her blind female parent walks in. He fears that if he is discovered he would be fired and arrested. In order to hush the bibulous miss, he suffocates her with a pillow. The female parent assumes her girl had merely passed out.

Bigger is in flight, both physically and metaphorically, throughout the 2nd chapter. After perpetrating slaying, he feels as though he can make anything. He felt a certain sense of power, a power Born of a latent power to populate the cognition that he had killed a white miss they had loved and regarded as their symbol of beauty made him experience the equal of them. ( 155 ) Like the winging male child, Icarus, Bigger challenges his new freedom. He attempts to get money from his victim s household. He writes a ransom note proposing Communists had kidnapped the miss and were keeping her for ransom. Bigger no longer feels the demand to speak or

interact with people who he originally felt had authorization over him. He did non look at them ; they were merely unsighted people ( 165 ) He alienates himself from his household. When investigators and his victim s household inquiry him, he provides them with minimum replies. Inevitably, grounds of his victim s dead organic structure is discovered and Bigger flees the scene. Now, he changes, adopts a new signifier of flight, one that is more actual. He must run, conceal and be in physical flight from the constabulary. Rather than bask his fleeting, religious freedom, he must recognize that the sense of power he feels as a consequence of taking human life has non earned him let go of from his oppressors. By the terminal of this chapter, Bigger crashes into a sea of pandemonium. He had flown excessively high. Like Icarus, his haughtiness had defeated him, go forthing him surrounded by constabulary.

Fate, instead than liberate will, takes over Bigger s life in the last chapter, go forthing him without a sense of control over his life. Once in gaol he knew his life was doomed. Never once more did he desire to experience anything like hope. ( 315 ) However, Bigger was provided with a communist attorney who helped him to accept his life for what it was. This attorney was the first white adult male who Bigger had interacted with that treated him as an equal. This attorney talked to him, showed Bigger other ways to let go of emphasis, tenseness, and fright beside force and offense. The unusual bang he felt when he talked about his jobs is unknown to him. He describes it as this new sense of the value of himself gained from Max s talk, a sense fleeting and obscure for the first clip in his life he felt the land beneath his pess. ( 334 ) His spirit felt freer than it of all time had before. In the terminal, Bigger was sentenced to decease, despite his attorney s antic statement ; nevertheless, Bigger was no longer afraid to decease. He tells Max in the last scene of the novel I didn t truly know I was truly alive in this universe until I felt things hard plenty to kill merely travel and state Ma I was all right Tell her I was all right and wasn T shouting none ( 392 )

Fear, Flight and Fate are dateless subjects in art, both classical and modern. Possibly these subjects resonate in art because they appear excessively frequently in life. Painter, Jean-Michel Basquiat expressed his life as a black creative person through his pictures. He depicted the biass he experienced as a Haitian-American through abstract expressionism. Many of his pictures characteristic images of inkinesss responding violently and perilously to their frights. Like Icarus and Bigger, Basquiat was suicidal. Throughout his young person, he was forced to populate on the streets. A well-known art critic discovered his work and began demoing it in New York galleries. Basquiat was a immense success in the art universe and he was able to get away his life in the streets. However, his pecuniary and critical success did non change his sense of ego or topographic point in society. The force of hurting and endurance of the street continue exert control over his life and endowments. He began utilizing his money on drugs. Inevitably, he destroyed himself through a diacetylmorphine overdose at age 25. While analysing Native Son, the reader is able to do connexions between Bigger s life and the narratives of Icarus and Basquiat. The subjects that they present, fright, flight, and destiny are common tools used to exemplify lives of laden people and their reactions to freedom and success.