Bigger and his fear, flight and fate
An ancient Greek myth has been told for centuries about a boy who lives in fear. Icarus had been forced to live his life imprisoned until one day he had the opportunity to escape. He had been provided with a pair of wax wings with which he could flee his captor. He took advantage of these wings and set sail. While in flight away from the prison, he discovered the joy and exhilaration that came with freedom. The boy challenged the wings and voyaged higher and closer to the hot sun. Soon enough, his wings melted and he perished in the vast sea. This story has served as a recurring theme in modern literature. In the early 1940's, acclaimed author, Richard Wright wrote his masterpiece Native Son. This novel deals with many of the same metaphorical ideas that first arose in the Greek myth. Wright's protagonist, Bigger, was a young African-American man who had been oppressed all his life by the white racist society which surrounded him. Much like Icarus, Bigger discovered a fatal way to release himself from his imprisoned life. And, like Icarus, Bigger also challenged his freedom and failed. Wright splits Bigger's story into three chapters, Fear, Flight and Fate. Each is significant to Bigger's journey through life.
Fate, rather than free will, takes over Bigger's life in the last chapter, leaving him without a sense of control over his life. Once in jail he knew his life was doomed. "Never again did he want to feel anything like hope." (315) However, Bigger was provided with a communist lawyer who helped him to accept his life for what it was. This lawyer was the first white man who Bigger had interacted with that treated him as an equal. This lawyer talked to him, showed Bigger other ways to release stress, tension, and fear beside violence and crime. The strange thrill he felt when he talked about his problems is unknown to him. He describes it as "this new sense of the value of himself gained from Max's talk, a sense fleeting and obscure...for the first time in his life he felt the ground beneath his feet." (334) His spirit felt freer than it ever had before. In the end, Bigger was sentenced to death, despite his lawyer's fantastic argument; however, Bigger was no longer afraid to die. He tells Max in the last scene of the novel "'I didn't really know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill...just go and tell Ma I was all right...tell her I was all right and wasn't crying none'" (392) Fear, Flight and Fate are timeless themes in art, both classical and modern. Perhaps these themes resonate in art because they appear too often in life. Painter, Jean-Michel Basquiat expressed his life as a black artist through his paintings. He depicted the prejudices he experienced as a Haitian-American through abstract expressionism. Many of his paintings feature images of blacks reacting violently and dangerously to their fears. Like Icarus and Bigger, Basquiat was self-destructive. Throughout his yout
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Approximate Word count = 1163
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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