{"id":209,"date":"2006-11-21T04:31:00","date_gmt":"2006-11-21T04:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading2\/?p=209"},"modified":"2006-11-21T04:31:00","modified_gmt":"2006-11-21T04:31:00","slug":"native-son-by-richard-wright","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/2006\/11\/native-son-by-richard-wright.html","title":{"rendered":"Native Son by Richard Wright"},"content":{"rendered":"

We’re told right at the beginning of Native Son<\/a> that Bigger, a young black man, is bound for trouble, that who he is and the world he lives in make it inevitable. He ends up hurting the only white people who were ever nice to him because he can’t reconcile their niceness with his reality. Although the initial crime is accidental, hurting someone makes him feel powerful and meaningful for the first time in his life and once he gets over the initial shock, he isn’t sorry.<\/p>\n

The first two sections of the book, where we watch him unwittingly commit a crime against a white woman and then seek to escape its repercussions, are lively and powerful. In the third section, he’s been caught and the pace slows way down as we can only watch Bigger contemplate, not do. Bigger is a little over-self-aware throughout the story (he knows too much about what makes him tick) but he becomes even more so during the third section, which also gets preachy as his lawyer lectures to him and to us about the “colored problem” and our inability to solve it. There’s a lot of really good stuff in there but it would be better if it were illustrated rather than spelled out.<\/p>\n

This was a 100 Best book I was able to get behind. Very gripping and worth a read. Also interesting in that I seem to have read a lot about the communist\/anarchist era recently and this was another take on it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We’re told right at the beginning of Native Son that Bigger, a young black man, is bound for trouble, that who he is and the world he lives in make it inevitable. He ends up hurting the only white people who were ever nice to him because he can’t reconcile their niceness with his reality. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-100-best","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=209"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}