“Native Son” by Richard Wright: Tentative, early impression that Bigger Thomas, the protagonist, may have multiple personality

At the beginning of Richard Wright’s Native Son, Bigger Thomas, a young black man, is called “crazy” (1, p. 8) by his mother. She doesn’t mean that he is psychotic or evil, but that he does thoughtless and bad things she finds puzzling. Puzzling inconsistency may be a clue to multiple personality.

Both Bigger and the narrator explain his violent and self-destructive behavior by relating it to racial oppression, which is real, and often does prompt his behavior. But since even his mother finds him puzzling, and since all African-Americans don’t respond to racial oppression the way that Bigger does, that can’t be the whole explanation.

“It’s like I was going to do something I can’t help” (1, p. 22), meaning that he sensed behavior was about to be initiated by an alternate personality?

“He was divided and pulled against himself” (1, p. 25).

“Confidence could only come again now through action so violent that it would make him forget [meaning behavior of a violent alternate personality that would leave him with a multiple personality memory gap?]. These were the rhythms of his life: indifference and violence…like water ebbing and flowing from the tug of a far-away, invisible force” [meaning an alternate personality with which his regular personality was not co-conscious?] (1, pp. 28-29).

“He was going to do something to Gus; just what, he did not know…he saw his fist come down on the side of Gus’s head; he had struck him really before he was conscious of doing so” (1, pp. 37-38).

Have you ever assaulted someone before you were conscious of doing so? Probably not, unless you have multiple personality.

1. Richard Wright. Native Son [1940]. Restored text by Library of America. New York, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2005.