Bigger Thomas is doomed, trapped in a downward spiral that  will lead to  arrest, prison, or death, driven by despair, frustration,  poverty, and  incomprehension. As a young black man in the Chicago of  the '30s, he  has no way out of the walls of poverty and racism that  surround him,  and after he murders a young white woman in a moment of  panic, these  walls begin to close in. There is no help for him--not  from his hapless  family; not from liberal do-gooders or from his  well-meaning yet naive  friend Jan; certainly not from the police,  prosecutors, or judges.  Bigger is debased, aggressive, dangerous, and  a violent criminal. As  such, he has no claim upon our compassion or  sympathy. And yet...

A more compelling story than Native Son has not been written in   the 20th century by an American writer. That is not to say that   Richard Wright created a novel free of flaws, but that he wrote the   first novel that successfully told the most painful and unvarnished   truth about American social and class relations. As   Irving  Howe asserted in 1963, "The day Native Son appeared,  American  culture was changed forever. It made impossible a repetition  of the  old lies [and] brought out into the open, as no one ever had  before,  the hatred, fear and violence that have crippled and may yet  destroy  our culture."

Other books had focused on the  experience of growing up black in  America--including Wright's own  highly successful   Uncle  Tom's  Children, a collection of five stories that focused on  the  victimization of blacks who transgressed the code of racial   segregation. But they suffered from what he saw as a kind of lyrical   idealism, setting up sympathetic black characters in oppressive   situations and evoking the reader's pity. In Native Son, Wright   was aiming at something more. In Bigger, he created a character so   damaged by racism and poverty, with dreams so perverted, and with  human  sensibilities so eroded, that he has no claim on the reader's   compassion:

"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.... What I killed  for must've  been good!" Bigger's voice was full of frenzied anguish.  "It must have  been good! When a man kills, it's for something... I  didn't know I was  really alive in this world until I felt things hard  enough to kill for  'em. It's the truth..."

Wright's  genius was that, in preventing us from feeling pity for  Bigger, he  forced us to confront the hopelessness, misery, and  injustice of the  society that gave birth to him.