SOURCE: Bryant, Jerry H. “Richard Wright and Bigger Thomas: Grace in Damnation.” In Victims and Heroes: Racial Violence in the African American Novel, pp. 197-210. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997.

In the following excerpt, Bryant discusses violence and racism in Richard Wright's Native Son, noting that the novel's protagonist, Bigger Thomas, is the first Black character in American literature to substitute his own value system for one given him by white society.

Of all the African American novelists who have explored the issues raised by violence, Richard Wright is the most probing. It is therefore fitting that he comes to us in medias res. In the person of Bigger Thomas, and in the features of his own personality which he puts into Bigger, Wright projects the most fundamental of the ambiguities residing in violence, and in the figures of the victim and the hero, and therefore provides the...