Impossible Situations

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 have (and did) receive for her murder would not have been porportionate to his guilt, and though the cleanup process was gruesome, the experience was most unpleasant for Bigger himself. But then, he stumbles onto thin ice when he feels happiness after the crime, crashes through it when he tries to frame Jan and extort the Daltons, and obliterates the entire pond with his treatment of Bessie, the character who got the rawest deal in the whole book.

Bigger's choices after Mary's death don't contribute to my main point, so I'm going to ignore them for the most part, and chalk them up to personal issues. What I want to discuss is the version of Bigger before he reveals that he's gross and irredeemable, the Bigger on the bed, scared for his life. I think this Bigger is an important piece in one of the arguments Wright is making with Native Son; when you put people in impossible situations, often, impossibily bad things happen.

And you could argue that Bigger Thomas's life is one big impossible situation. He lives in an overpriced, rat-infested room with his entire family, had to drop out of school in the eight grade, and knows that, odds are, he'll never be a pilot. Things are pretty bad. Even impossible, from certain perspectives. So what does Bigger do? Crime, with and on his friends. And again, the beating up his friends part might just be a fun little quirk of his, but the rest of the crime is pretty easy to justify. He has no money, he needs money, he gets money. That kind of crime might be compeltely circumstancial, practiced by anyone in that kind of situation, not just psychos like Bigger. 

To wrap it all up, people work with what you give them. And in the heat of the moment, to Mary Dalton's misfortune, what Bigger had to work with was a pillow. In his desperation to not be labelled a predator, he became a real predator, and from that point on, really leaned into his newfound role. But you've got to think, if society was better and not racist, maybe in that moment he would have thought, Hey, if I just explain to Mrs. Dalton what's happening, everything will be fine, and maybe he would have been right. If that had happened, both Mary and Bigger might still be alive. But society isn't better, and is racist, and when you reread the murder scene and reconsider Bigger's choice, you have to wonder, was either potential outcome right? I think Wright is trying to tell the reader that the real problem wasn't Bigger's final decision, but the options he was working with.