Honors Blog #2

In a well developed, thoughtful piece of writing that uses direct quotes, explain the use of symbols to develop a theme in your novel


In the book I'm reading Native Son written by Richard Wright, I was given this book by my advisor who believed this would be a great book for me to read. It is about a young black boy named Bigger who in growing up in poverty having to see his mother struggle and siblings walk around with their heads hung low, but like every other teenage boy Bigger wants to do what he wants to do and not want to hear what he mother has to say about every little thing he does. Bigger has a few friends who see his town in a different way, Bigger sees white. White walls, white cars but most of all white faces. He looks at them all the same, they are no different from each other they are selfish and racist.

Bigger's mother mentions a job that he should take, he would be a chauffeur for the Dalton family; a white family. And to Bigger that is what he doesn't want. But he goes to check out the job anyway, Mr. Dalton interviews Bigger and sees he is the one to hire. He meets Mrs. Dalton and sees that she in blind, he can tell the way she touches the white walls to find her way and stumble a few times. He starts his first day off by having to take Mary Dalton (the daughter) to a university for a program but instead Mary mentions she won't be going to the university and will be going to see a friend of hers. Bigger catches on pretty fast and understands what Mary meant, after bringing Mary home from a night out he helps her up the stairs to her room because she cannot make it herself because of the rum they drank earlier that night.

After a few kisses between Bigger and Mary, Mrs. Dalton enters the room although she is blind Bigger is afraid of Mary saying something about him. So he covers her face with a pillow after a while he realizes that he was suffocating Mary and she had died. He picked up her body to discard it in the furness, her her can't fit in the furness so he cuts it off and burns everything he can but takes her purse. That was just the end of his first day.

The symbol I chose to talk about is Mrs. Dalton's blindness. Bigger notices Mrs. Dalton's blindness because how she touches the white walls trying to find her way around the house, after murdering Mary Dalton, Bigger starts to realize other blind people in his life who do things to get reality out there head for a while. Bigger notices his mother and family being blind to the world of white people are superior and that's just the way it is, he wants to do something and not graze by it. In book two part one he starts to think about Hitler in Germany and Mussolini in Italy and how they came and helped their people and how he wished someone could come and "end fear and shame." He says it as if Hitler and Mussolini were people who helped when all they did was destroy. He also mentions his girlfriend Bessie and how she is blind and she drinks alcohol to cover up her worries.

But I start to think of how Bigger is blind as well. Because when he talks about Hitler and Mussolini he seems as if he doesn't know what he really is talking about. Hitler and Mussolini were people who came along and made a problem everyone else's problem and that's why he is I guess seen as a hero in Bigger's eyes. This symbol is very important because when looking around there are people who are blind in our lives, we are even blind at some point. For example it seems like the government can be blind when it comes to people's need and how they make it seem as nothing is wrong and there is no problem but there is. Like how today is the 150th anniversary of the civil war and how in every document we looked at in class, they failed to use the word slave or money. When most likely those probably were significant reasons which caused the civil war.

How many people do you see that are "blind" which don't realize what is actually going on?

Are you blind?