Who is Bigger in Native Son?

     In "How Bigger Was Born" Richard Wright talks very explicitly about how he views Native Son's Bigger Thomas as a composite of many people that he has known and observed over the course of his life. He discusses at length their various qualities and the ways that he thinks they all exemplify what he was trying to communicate through Bigger in Native Son. For me, this supplement was definitely the most clarifying part of the book in reference to Bigger's character, and it was really interesting to read that after reading and discussing the book. 

    Reading Wright's description of who this character is and what his existence means is a very different experience from reading the book itself. Bigger means something much more expansive and far-reaching to Wright personally than just the character in this book. He is the culmination of many years of observation of the behavior of huge numbers of people, almost a theory of human nature in some ways. Wright says, "I made the discovery that Bigger Thomas was not black all the time; he was white, too, and there were literally millions of him, everywhere. The extension of my sense of the personality of Bigger was the pivot of my life; it altered the complexion of my existence" (Wright, 441). It is clear that this character and theory mean much more than any real person ever could. Bigger has been almost mythologized here. Wright even explicitly refers to Bigger as a "symbol" twice in this essay (441 and 447, although the second mention is confusing and without the context of several paragraphs it seems like Wright is saying that Bigger is not a symbol). 

    In class, one of the main themes that we talked about with this book was the way that Bigger's environment essentially controls him, or at least controls his options. I think that this is definitely a significant part of Wright's vision for this character, but there is a lot more to Wright's vision here than can really be seen without his supplemental commentary. Bigger is primarily a symbolic character on every possible level. He is treated as a symbol by the white people who portray his life and story in the most racist light possible, but also by Max, who would defend him by saying that he is a representative of an entire group, and explicitly highlighting the optics of his case and what the decision would mean for a whole community. But on a meta-level, he is treated as a symbol by Wright himself, for the way that racism impacts people, yes, but also for a certain type of resistance to it, and a lot more. Bigger carries a lot of symbolic weight for Wright in this novel, as you can tell through the detail with which he is able to name all of his influences so methodically. But on another level, forcing Bigger to contain these contradictory ideas means that he acts as a screen onto which people project whatever narrative they want to tell through his story. "When they approach [him] they see only [his] surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination--indeed, everything and anything except [him]" (Ellison, 3). Bigger, through the pressure exerted on him by not just outside forces but even the book itself, becomes, in many ways, an Invisible Man.