“What His Life Meant”

The problem of meaning is at the core of Bigger Thomas’s story. In his account of the novel’s origins, Wright repeatedly invokes the idea that Bigger’s life means something much . . . well, bigger—it resonates or signifies beyond the small number of individual lives that are affected by his actions: “I had spent years learning about Bigger, what had made him, what he meant; so, when the time came for writing, what had made him and what he meant constituted my plot” (“How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” 454). Max’s entire “defense” of Bigger in the courtroom has almost nothing to do with questions of guilt or innocence. Instead, he concerns himself with trying to bring a fuller picture of Bigger’s existence into the official record. According to Max’s argument, “Multiply Bigger Thomas twelve million times . . . and you have the psychology of the Negro people” (397). The court would like to simply extinguish him as a one-dimensional “black rapist and monster,” but Max (more or less Wright’s mouthpiece in Book 3) insists that America ignores this “monster” it has created at its peril. He is our “native son,” and we should attend to the warning he represents.

The idea that an individual life has meaning can be understood in a range of ways, from the metaphysical (the capital M-and-L Meaning of Life—some deeper, spiritual, cosmic significance) to the more mundane (one wants to play a meaningful role in one’s community or family, to do work that brings deeper satisfaction, and so on). Bigger suffers from an absence of meaning at all levels. He chafes against the realization that he does not have  a “wider choice of action” (12). He feels forced to accept the job as a chauffeur for the Daltons (“he felt they had tricked him into a cheap surrender” [12]) and complains that he “can’t get used to” the ways that poverty and racism make everyday life “like living in jail” (20). Wright makes clear that Bigger has to tightly regulate his own consciousness to keep the incipient sense of meaninglessness at bay: “He hated his family because he knew that they were suffering and that he was powerless to help them. He knew that the moment he allowed himself to feel to its fullness how they lived, the shame and misery of their lives, he would be swept out of himself with fear and despair. . . . He knew that the moment he allowed what his life meant to enter fully into his consciousness, he would either kill himself or someone else” (10). It’s not quite right to say that he views his life as “meaningless”: he’s overwhelmed with a sense of futility, emasculation, and entrapment, but he senses, ironically, that in this very absence of meaning or purpose lies the “meaning” of his life. Meaninglessness is his meaning. He feels like the butt of some cosmic joke, and everywhere he looks, he is taunted by all the things white people can do that he can’t.

            So when he kills Mary—even though the act is accidental—he redefines it as an intentional rebellion against all the forces the universe has stacked against him. It becomes, retrospectively, the kind of “symbolic challenge of the white world’s rule” (14) that the aborted robbery of Blum’s was supposed to be: “The knowledge that he had killed a white girl they loved and regarded as their symbol of beauty made him feel the equal of them, like a man who had been somehow cheated, but had now evened the score” (164); “In all of his life these two murders were the most meaningful things that had ever happened to him. He was living, truly and deeply, no matter what others might think, looking at him with their blind eyes” (239). He invests an absurd and horrible accident with meaning.

But a crucial aspect of meaning is that it must be understood and acknowledged by others—the meaning that Bigger privately constructs needs traction in the outside world. And he quickly learns that the media, the police, and the court will ultimately be the ones who define his act of would-be symbolic rebellion: he will be seen and depicted as yet another “black beast rapist and murderer,” a statistic, a stereotype. Bigger experiences meaning as a private, internal sensation of freedom and control—“never had his will been so free as in this night and day of fear and murder and flight” (239)—but the cold, naturalist gaze of the narrative allows us to see how fleeting and illusory, how undermined by irony, this sensation proves to be. Meaning is not a feeling; it is a transaction. Words have meaning because they are part of a living language, and my statements only make sense to the extent that I can frame them in words that have a publicly shared meaning. For a life to be meaningful, it must be communicated.

Bigger Thomas is an enigma for everyone in the novel: his mother wonders aloud what makes him act like he does (7); his friends see him as a moody, mercurial guy who pulls a knife on you one day and buys you a drink the next; the Daltons and their housekeeper see him as “just a quiet colored boy,” shy and deferential; and Jan and Mary see him as an exotic ticket to South Side nightlife who, for some reason, won’t quite warm to their overtures of friendship. No one seems to understand him. He’s even an enigma to himself. In a very real sense, the reader “knows” him better than anyone else in his life; Wright makes sure that we understand the complex psychological dynamics whereby perpetual fear underlies his tough external persona. As his comments in “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” indicate, the author wants to ensure that the reader understands “what his life meant,” even if no one else does.

Communication is a problem for Bigger. He is not a man of words, and he often views the act of speaking, of trying to give shape to his private experience in language, to be inherently futile. But upon his arrest, when his doom is all but spelled out for him, he feels a powerful urge to account for himself, to speak—to confess, not as a matter of guilt and conscience, but as a matter of self-expression. The police already have amassed a staggering amount of evidence against him, and for the state’s attorney, the confession is a mere technicality—the final nail in a slam-dunk prosecution: “Confess it all and get it over with,” Buckley tells him (308). Bigger is no longer riding the wave of euphoric meaning surrounding his rebellious actions. He feels a strong desire toward a more commonplace—and real—form of meaning. He wants to explain himself, but he doubts whether it is possible to do so: “He knew . . . that he could never tell why he had killed. It was not that he did not really want to tell, but the telling of it would have involved an explanation of his entire life. . . . His crimes were known, but what he had felt before he committed them would never be known. He would have gladly admitted his guilt if he had thought that in doing so he could have also given in the same breath a sense of the deep, choking hate that had been his life. . . . The impulsion to try to tell was as deep as had been the urge to kill” (308). The reader has a pretty good sense of what Bigger is referring to: Wright narrates, in the grisly climax to Book 1, not only Bigger’s atrocious actions but, crucially, the feelings that accompany them. We are the only “witnesses” to his “crime”; we understand, to the extent that such understanding is possible through the reading of a fictional narrative, “what he had felt.” “Bigger wanted to tell how he felt when Jan had held his hand; how Mary had made him feel when she asked him about how Negroes lived. . . . But there were no words for him” (309). Buckley will never grasp the connection between Jan shaking his hand and Bigger smothering Mary, but we do. And now we witness the pain of Bigger not being able to express that connection—of the meaning of his crime being completely misconstrued by those in charge of determining his guilt or innocence.

Bigger does confess, despite the nagging sense of futility. “He traced his every action. He paused at each question Buckley asked and wondered how he could link up his bare actions with what he had felt; but his words came out flat and dull” (309). When his confession is finished, he feels “more lost and undone than when he was captured” (309). He has attempted to express himself, to make himself visible, to give his actions meaning (not to “justify” but to explain), and he has failed. Bigger sits in silence as Buckley and his assistant congratulate each other on a job well done: “That was not as hard as I thought it would be.” “He came through like a clock.” “Just a scared colored boy from Mississippi” (310). Maybe the saddest, most forlorn moment in the book is Bigger sitting there in silence, feeling “forgotten” by the officials who’ve gotten what they wanted from him: “Bigger felt so empty and beaten that he slid to the floor. . . . He was alone, profoundly, inescapably. He rolled on the floor and sobbed, wondering what it was that had hold of him, why he was here” (310). The solitude he feels here is existential—profound, inescapable solitude—and it comes from a failure to express himself, to communicate the meaning of his life. He confesses the actions but cannot convey their meaning.

This is where Max comes in, and why his role in the novel is so crucial. He gets Bigger to talk openly and honestly. “I want you to tell me all about yourself” (345), he says. Bigger hesitates, but then, “looking straight into Max’s eyes” (346), he slowly comes out of his shell. “His talking to Max had evoked again in him that urge to talk, to tell, to try to make his feelings known” (348). He details not only his damning actions but the full picture, his reflexive “hatred” for Mary and the way she was making him feel (“like a dog. I was so mad I wanted to cry” [350]). “He knew that his actions did not seem logical and he gave up trying to explain them logically. He reverted to his feelings as a guide in answering Max” (350). The prosecution will supply its own explanatory logic to account for Bigger’s crime—just plug it in to the ready-made stereotype about black men’s uncontrollable lust for white women; cast Bigger as a sexual predator. The script, as it were, precedes him. But Bigger’s emotional, subjective logic leads Max to understand, and indeed, Max’s “representation” of Bigger in court hews remarkably close to Wright’s narrative of the incident. (At times it almost seems like Max has read Book 1 of Native Son. . . .)

Bigger speaks to Max “as he had never spoken to anyone in his life; not even to himself,” and the experience is an enormous relief to him (359). The “burden” Bigger feels lifted here, I think, is the burden of being misunderstood, invisible, forced to live out a stereotype. The question of justice at this point in the novel has nothing to do with Bigger’s culpability but with whether his life will have meaning. And this depends upon his ability to communicate—with a listener (or reader?) who can understand.