Semester 2, Blog 8: Honors

In a well developed, thoughtful piece of writing that uses direct quotes, explain the relationship between your honors novel and the time period that fostered it's creation.

My novel, Native Son, by Richard Wright, took place in the 1930's when there was still segregation and a large amount of racism. The main character, Bigger, is constantly thinking about about the priveleges white people have and the ones that black people don't have. In the beginning of the book when Bigger and his friend Gus are looking up at a jet in the sky Gus says, "If you wasn't black and if you had some money and if they'd let you go to that aviation school, you could fly a plane." (Wright 17). At that time African Americans were not able to do many things that white people were able to, and if they were able to do something like go to school, they most likely could not afford it. When the Dalton family find that their daughter Mary has gone missing they call a detective. The detective interrogates Bigger and accuses him of being a communist. When he is done interrogating Bigger, Bigger goes up to his room and listens to what Mr. Dalton and the detective Britten are saying. He overhears Britten say, "To me, a nigger's a nigger." (Wright 163). Britten implies that because Bigger is black, he must have something to do with Mary's disappearance. This also shows that at that time period, blacks were not looked at as individuals, but more a stereotyped whole that is ignorant uneducated people who are likely to do bad things. The whole novel is based on the discrimination of African Americans at that time. They were put into bad living conditions because people like Mr. Dalton who owned the housing would not allow black people to live in the nicer apartments and also raised the price for how much the families pay. Communism was also big at that time and there was propoganda to make people fear and hate communists. Native Son in almost every way is written because of the time period and everything in the novel has to do with what things were like for African Americans in the 1930's.