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Once upon a time, the asylum patients the narrator meets in the Golden Day were the kind of men Mr. Norton would have loved to meet. They were all professionals, successful in their field, and from Norton's perspective, evidence that his efforts to "uplift" black people were fruitful.  But things didn't quite go to plan. All of them were drafted into the war, suffered immense trauma, and returned to suffer even more due to their race. Their credentials weren't enough to exempt them from racism, and eventually they either gave on up society or were pushed out, and ended up in an insane asylum. The veterans represent the shortcomings of institutions like the narrator's college (and coincidentally, their aslyum is right down the road from it). They did everything right - got an education, learned a trade, showed talent for it - but then came war and racism. In a way, the war could represent the experience of dealing with racism - the veterans just wanted to live ...

One of Bigger Thomas's most symapthetic moments in when he's put in an impossible situation. He's in his rich, white boss's house, on top of his daughter, a few feet away from his blind yet observant wife. Bigger can either allow himself to be discovered, and almost definitely face the consequences of a sexual assault conviction, or silence the girl, and face the consequences of that. Running on instinct and desperate to escape the first option, Bigger chooses the latter, and begins to discover the ramifictions of his decision a few minutes later.  It's hard to fault Bigger for Mary's murder. He did his best to avoid being in the position where Mrs. Dalton almost found him, and mostly ended up there due to bad luck and Mary's obliviousness to his vulnerability. And once he was there, he didn't mean to kill her, he just wanted very badly for her to stop talking. I can even justify how he concealed his crime, on the grounds that the punishment he would hav...