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PARTISAN REVIEW
see the fruit of that oppression: and he feels, when his family and
his friends come to visit him in the death cell, that they should not
be weeping or frightened, that they should be happy,
proud
that he
has dared, through murder and now through his own imminent
destruction, to redeem their anger and humiliation, that he has
hurled into the spiritless obscurity of their lives the lamp of his
passionate life and death. Henceforth, they may remember Bigger–
who has died, as we may conclude, for them. But they do not feel
this; they only know that he has murdered two women and pre–
cipitated a reign of terror; and that now he is to die in the electric
chair. They therefore weep and are honestly frightened-for which
Bigger despises them and wishes to "blot" them out. What is missing
in his situation and in the representation of his psychology-which
makes his situation false and his psychology incapable of develop–
ment-is any revelatory apprehension of Bigger as one of the
Negro's realities or as one of the Negro's roles. This failure is part
of the previously noted failure to' convey any sense of Negro life
as a continuing and complex group reality. Bigger, who cannot
function therefore as a reflection of the social illness, having, as it
were, no society to reflect, likewise refuses to function on the loftier
level of the Christ-symbol. His kinsmen are quite right to weep and
be frightened, even to be appalled: for it is not his love for them or
for himself which causes him to die, but his hatred and his self–
hatred; he does not redeem the pains of a despised people, but reveals,
on the contrary, nothing more than his own fierce bitterness at hav–
ing been born one of them. In this also he is the "native son," his
progress determinable by the speed with which the distance in–
creases between himself and the auction-block and all that the auc–
tion-block implies. To have penetrated this phenomenon, this inward
contention of love and hatred, blackness and whiteness, would have
given him a stature more nearly human and an end more nearly
tragic; and would have given us a document more profoundly and
genuinely bitter and less harsh with an anger which is, on the one
hand, exhibited and, on the other hand, denied.
Native Son
finds itself at length so trapped by the American
image of Negro life and by the American necessity to find the ray of
hope that
it
cannot pursue its own implications. This is why Bigger
must be at the last redeemed, to be received, if only by rhetoric, into
