“Native Son” by Richard Wright (post 4): At novel’s conclusion, Bigger inadvertently reveals he has multiple-personality memory gaps for murders

“I didn’t want to kill!” Bigger shouted. “But what I killed for, I am! It must’ve been pretty deep in me to make me kill! I must have felt it awful hard to murder” (1, p. 429).

“I must have felt it awful hard to murder” means that he doesn’t actually recall how he felt, because he has that cardinal symptom of multiple personality, a memory gap (search it on this site).

Wright’s essay, “How ‘Bigger’ was Born” (1940) (1, pp. 433-462) makes no reference to multiple personality. However, in googling, I find that Wright was interested in existentialism (search “Sartre” and “Kierkegaard” in this blog) and “double consciousness” (search it), the latter a concept borrowed by W. E. B. Du Bois from 19th and early 20th century psychology, where it referred to multiple personality and related phenomena.

Thus, Native Son is one more novel with unlabeled, unacknowledged, multiple personality.

1. Richard Wright. Native Son [1940]. New York, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2005.