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destroy yourself. We must “Be Bigger” for the benefit of our individual selves and all of common humanity! Notes 1. This conclusion about student readership of Native Son is based on Dennis Sullivan, et al.’s study of James A. Miller’s Approaches to Teaching Wright’ s Native Son. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1997. Their interpretation of the study reveals little if any connection among the students between Jan and Bigger at the end of the novel—the sections where Bigger’s transformation is complete. They also mention a similar type of statement about Bigger’s transformation in S.A. Bogus’ Lessons in Truth: Teaching ourselves and our students Native Son in J.A. Miller (Ed), Approaches to Teaching Wright’s Native Son (pp. 102-111). New York: The Modern Language Association of America. Dennis Sullivan, et al. cites S.A. Bogus’ study mentioning, her saying, “. . . Having allowed himself to begin to feel again, he (Bigger) thinks that the world might be different from what until now he had allowed himself to see. . . it is from here and only from here that teaching Native Son is possible for me” (108). Despite this fact, Sullivan et al also cites Bogus’ disregard for Jan’s role in this positive reciprocal transformation with Bigger when she says their final encounter only met “Jan’s need for consolation” only to transcend his own feelings of vengeance and his meeting with Bigger was essentially “self centered, for his own benefit” (109). For more details about Dennis Sullivan, et al’s study of James A. Miller’s and S.A. Bogus’ critical texts regarding the teaching of Native Son, see Dennis Sullivan, et.al, pp. 417, 421-22. 2. Page 408 of Native Son cited on page 278 of Kennedy. 3. See Aime J. Ellis, pgs. 182-83 where she cites Margaret Walker’s biography of Wright, Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad Press, 1988: “Who else but a Mississippi boy, who had lived in rural and urban Mississippi and been wounded by the painful sting of white racism, circumscribed and constrained to poverty-stricken black world of ignorance and superstition, who had observed the weekly Saturday night razor-cutting scr apes and the drunkenness of tortured and powerless black men killing their own and craving to kill the white man whom they blamed for their depth of degradation and racial impotence, who else but a Mississippi black boy could write such authenticity of the tormented depths in the soul of a black youth?” (148). 4. Phyllis R. Klotman, Moral Distancing as a Rhetotical Technique in Native Son: A Note on ‘Fate’ cited on pg. 73 of Hakutani. WORKS CITED Akbar, Naim. Breaking the Chains of Psychological Slavery. Tallahassee, Florida: Mind Productions and Associates, Inc, 1996. Know Thyself. Tallahassee, Florida: Mind Productions and Associates Inc., 1998. Baldwin, James. Notes of a Native Son. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955. Butler, Robert. Native Son: The Emergence of a New Black Hero. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991. Camus, Albert. The Rebel. New York: Alfred A. Knopf and Random House, 1956. Ellis, Aime J. “’Boys in the Hood.’ Black Male Community in Richard Wright’s Native Son.” Callaloo. 29.1 (Winter 2006), pp. 182-201. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage: Random House, 1952. Elder, Matthew. “Social Demarcation and the Forms of Psychological Fracture in Book One of Richard Wright’s Native Son.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 52, No. 1, Spring 2010, pp. 31-47. Hakutani, Yoshinobu. Richard Wright and Racial Discourse. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1996. Hogue, W. Lawrence. “Can the Subaltern Speak? A Postcolonial, Existential Reading of