This post is more of a question than anything else. I just wanted to get it out there before everyone started to push Native Son out of their heads to make room for Invisible Man. After Bigger kills Mary he starts talking about how everyone seems blind. I never really got exactly what he was saying. Blind to what? To him? To their oppression? Although, Mrs. Dalton seems to be the ultimate symbol of this blindness so it couldn't be their oppression. Perhaps it's just general ignorance or lack of insight.
Anyway, we never really went into depth about this in class, so if anyone has any thoughts on the matter, I would be happy to hear them.
I think what Wright intended "blind" to mean was the characters' general ignorance towards the racial lines in society. It is understandable that he calls the Daltons blind, as while they try to be understanding, it is obvious that they simply can't comprehend the complexity of Bigger's situation. We see this when each of them in turn tries to prove to him that they are open minded. Mrs. Dalton tells him her concern with his getting a better education, and Mr. Dalton informs him that he has donated thousands of dollars to charity (and let's not forget those ping pong tables). Then, Mary and Jan make a huge effort to be his "equal," so to speak, but all it causes is to make Bigger feel even more uncomfortable. This displays the blindness Wright is referring to. The Daltons, and others like them, don't really seem to comprehend Bigger as an actual equal, but rather as a fascinating representative of the race as a whole. Besides the Daltons, we also see Bigger call his family blind. I guess what he's referring to here is that they are pretty simple minded, and the cultural lines are also not clear to them. While this is a different form of blindness than the Daltons, I certainly think it's related. On top of all of this, I think it's interesting to ask ourselves; is Bigger himself blind? While we have to give him credit for recognizing others' blindness, we also see that his subconscious seems to understand more than he would let himself believe.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Pauline. That makes a lot of sense.
DeleteI think that certainly at the start of the book, Bigger is quite blind. Maybe by the end he is overcoming it somewhat. I don't think he reaches this until the very end, though. When he is seeing the blindness of others for the first time, he still seems to be blind himself because at this point in the story he is relishing in this false sense of freedom and control, which we can see is an illusion and won't last long.
Blindness seems to be an even bigger theme in Invisible Man. So I suspect we'll be talking about it quite a bit more in class soon.
Making room here for both Invisible Man and Native Son -- I think the "blindness" Bigger recognizes is the same blindness that the narrator of Invisible Man notices in everyone: their inability to recognize black men as individuals. Although the two protagonists are completely different people (one a hyper-respectable college student and one a headline-making killer), outsiders would relate them just by their skin color, and they are ridiculed similarly. Just as Bigger must have had a while accomplice for his murder (there's no way his dumb black brain could think of that alone) and he's able to slip out of suspicion at first by taking advantage of this mentality, the narrator in Invisible Man's academic accomplishments are reduced to "this boy knows more words than a pocket-sized dictionary!" There you have it, two ways: blindness to the full weight of an action.
ReplyDeleteThese protagonists are such drastically different characters in nature: the Chicago boy who roughs around with friends and is quick to strike out on his emotions, and the meek, clean boy whose greatest aspiration is to go to college and be patted on the back. Honestly, if they were both white and therefore not affected by race dynamics of their time, I don't think we would be studying these two characters in the same class.
Michelle makes a good point: I see Wright's idea of "blindness" (which is what Bigger perceives in those who don't grasp his role in the crime) as akin to Ellison's idea of invisibility. Bigger is effectively marveling that he can make himself "invisible" to these figures of authority, in this case by playing dumb and working with their perceptions of him as someone who wouldn't be capable of such complex and plotted actions. He uses this perception of him to find room in which to navigate--and this is akin to the narrator's celebration of the "benefits" of invisibility. In Wright, from Bigger's point of view, these people are "blind" not because they see *nothing*, but because they see what they want to see when they look at Bigger, and once he's aware of this, he can manipulate their perceptions accordingly.
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