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.
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