리처드 라이트의 『토박이』 다시 읽기: 비거 토머스와 잰 얼론의 관계를 중심으로
Re-reading Richard Wright’s Native Son: Focusing on the Relationship between Bigger Thomas and Jan Erlone
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Richard Wright’s Native Son has long been read as a representative work of African-American protest writings, and the paradigms through which Bigger Thomas has been presented as a social symbol of racial anger, or as a prototype of the revolutionary black hero, seem to limit the possibilities of reading the novel otherwise. This paper attempts to find the meaning of Wright’s novel not in Bigger’s revolt and his clenched militancy toward whites, as many critics have insisted, but in the human solidarity that Bigger has established with Jan Erlone, despite the murderer-victim relation and more importantly, despite a long history of racial hostility between the black man and the white man. I look closely into the three pivotal encounters between Bigger and Jan as described in each section. The examination will show that Bigger’s acceptance of Jan’s friendship at the end of the novel is not an unmotivated or improvised event prompted by the self-abandoned murderer waiting to be executed and the devout Communist who is capable of suppressing personal grief for a higher ideological cause, but a product thoroughly ‘earned’ by Bigger and Jan going through sufficient conflicts, conversion, and growth.
Abstract
Richard Wright’s Native Son has long been read as a representative work of African-American protest writings, and the paradigms through which Bigger Thomas has been presented as a social symbol of racial anger, or as a prototype of the revolutionary black hero, seem to limit the possibilities of reading the novel otherwise. This paper attempts to find the meaning of Wright’s novel not in Bigger’s revolt and his clenched militancy toward whites, as many critics have insisted, but in the human solidarity that Bigger has established with Jan Erlone, despite the murderer-victim relation and more importantly, despite a long history of racial hostility between the black man and the white man. I look closely into the three pivotal encounters between Bigger and Jan as described in each section. The examination will show that Bigger’s acceptance of Jan’s friendship at the end of the novel is not an unmotivated or improvised event prompted by the self-abandoned murderer waiting to be executed and the devout Communist who is capable of suppressing personal grief for a higher ideological cause, but a product thoroughly ‘earned’ by Bigger and Jan going through sufficient conflicts, conversion, and growth.
참고문헌 (19)
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- Burgum, Edwin Berry, "Critical Essays on Richard Wright’s Native Son", pp.63~74 (1997), Twayne
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- Oliver, Kelly, "Colonization of Psychic Space" (2004), U of Minnesota P
- Sadler, Jeffrey A., "Split Consciousness in Richard Wright’s Native Son", The South Carolina Review, 8, pp.18~24 (1976)
- Sullivan, Dennis, "The Transformation of Self and Other: Restorative Justice in Richard Wright’s Native Son", Contemporary Justice Review, 9(4), pp.401~425 (2006)[DOI]
- Webb, Constance, "Richard Wright : A Biography" (1968), G. P. Putnam’s Sons
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- Wright, Richard, "Native Son" (2005), HarperPerennial
- Wright, Richard, "Uncle Tom’s Children" (1993), HarperPerennial
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