The Power of Blackness: Richard Wright Re-Writes Moby-Dick.

In his autobiography Black Boy (1945), Richard Wright describes the desperate hunger for books which characterized his boyhood and the diverse subterfuges he devised in order to satisfy it. A century earlier, Frederick Douglass, as if anticipating Wright in The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), had revealed that a black boy, in a racist society, would have to resort to duplicitous means if he yearned to read. Reading proved liberating for both the young Douglass and the young Wright, since it provided concepts and narratives which confirmed and illuminated their experiences. As a consequence, they became insatiable readers, and as biographers and literary critics have often shown, they later relied on their reading to convey to their own readers the distinction and signification of their writing. Thus, critics demonstrate that Douglass's Narrative depends for its success in part on the rhetoric and structure of such works as The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and Emerson's "Self-Relianc e" [1]; and from the moment of Native Son's publication in 1940, it was evaluated in relation to other novels--Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath in Henry Seidel Canby's promotion of the novel for the Book-of-the-Month Club and Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment in Dorothy Canfield Fisher's introduction to the first edition. [2]

Wright's biographers Keneth Kinnamon and Michel Fabre discuss in detail the numbers of writers he absorbed in the years of his literary apprenticeship. Starting with Mencken in Memphis, he went on to read Sinclair Lewis, Edgar Lee Masters, Sherwood Anderson, Joseph Conrad, and Charles Dickens; moving to Chicago, he added, among others, Jack London, James Joyce, Theodore Dreiser, Gertrude Stein, Stephen Crane, Maxim Gorky, Marcel Proust, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Joseph Wood Krutch, Henry James, Aldous Wood Huxley, and the writers of the Harlem Renaissance. As Kinnamon points out, Wright persisted as well in reading philosophical, political, and sociological materials (Emergence 44, 46, 70). Fabre notes that Wright was a reader of all genres--"magazines, Westerns, literary and progressive political journals, novels,... essays by Stalin and theoretical works on Marxism" (Unfinished 170). In the last stages of composing Native Son in New York in 1939, according to Fabre, Wright was reading Dostoyevksy's The Poss essed and The Brothers Karamazov, Ernest Hemingway's short stories, Andre Malraux's Man's Hope, and Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace (176). Numerous critics have subsequently argued for the importance of many of these writers, their theories, and their genres in Wright's creation of Native Son. [3] In these catalogs testifying to Wright's omnivorous consumption of reading materials, however, there is no mention made of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, the novel which, during the years Wright was so intensely engaged in creating Native Son (1937-1939), numerous critics, publishers, and readers were endorsing and proclaiming as the great American novel. [4] Nor have subsequent critics noted the impact of Moby-Dick on Native Son. [5]

In his indispensable list of Wright's library and reading, Richard Wright: Books & Writers, Fabre cites a 1948 interview in which Wright asserts that, along with Metamorphosis, Ulysses, and The Sound and the Fury, Moby-Dick was his favorite novel (50, 107). [6] Fabre's introduction to Books & Writers explains that Wright owned very few books prior to 1940 and was therefore dependent on libraries and friends from whom he could borrow books for many years. Thus, although Fabre notes that Wright acquired his copy of the 1930 Modern Library edition of Moby-Dick, illustrated by Rockwell Kent, after 1940, it is not unlikely that Wright might have borrowed a copy of Moby-Dick to read before 1940, since other evidence argues for Wright's close familiarity with Melville's novel before and during the composition of Native Son. In "Personalism," an essay thought to have been written between 1935 and 1937, Wright comments, perhaps in anticipation of the conflict in Native Son, that "Melville dramatized his conflict with society in emotional terms, basically pessimistic" (107). A book which Wrig ht did own before 1940 was Lewis Mumford's extravagantly laudatory critical study Herman Melville: A Study of His Life and Vision (1929), which, in the context of evaluating Moby-Dick as an American epic, also quotes extensively from it (129ff). An earlier work of Mumford's, The Golden Day (1926), which places Moby-Dick at the center of his interpretation of American culture, Wright explicitly indicated as influencing "Long Black Song," the third story in his 1938 book Uncle Tom's Children (Fabre, Richard 112). [7]

Wright's powerful and revelatory essay "How 'Bigger' Was Born," written in 1940 in the wake of the phenomenal publishing success of Native Son, explains that he imagined "a Negro Bigger Thomas [who] would loom as a symbolic figure of American life, a figure who would hold within him the prophecy of our future" (522). He writes that he became convinced that he should try to make Bigger "a living personality and at the same time a symbol of all the larger things" (524). Of all characters in American literature with whom Wright might have been acquainted at the time of Native Son's composition, Melville's Ahab would have appeared prominently as "a symbolic figure of American life." Forty years ago, Robert Bone provocatively pointed out that Native Son shares an epic scope as grand in scale as Moby-Dick's:

[In Native Son,] the murder and the circumstances which surround it are in reality an extended metaphor, like the whale hunt in Moby-Dick. The novel is not to be read merely as the story of a gruesome crime, though it is that. It is the hidden meaning of Bigger's life, as revealed by the murder, which is the real subject of Native Son. The novel is a modern epic, consisting of action on the grand scale. (145)

By creating Bigger as a symbol and his quest for meaning as mythic, Wright ennobled his protagonist and enlarged his novel's frame of reference. In so doing, he endeavored to relate Bigger to the "literally millions of him, everywhere," and thereby "transcend national and racial boundaries" ("How" 514, 518). Yet as "How 'Bigger' Was Born" reveals, the frame for Native Son, for Bigger's life, remains irrefutably America's racist society, and Wright remains irrefutably committed to challenging the injustices and brutalities of that particular society through his novel. From its outset the essay also makes apparent that Wright's sources for Native Son sprang from his own painful experiences and observations in a racist society as well as from his extensive reading of Western literature. In a revelatory statement, Wright indicates that he intentionally forged his reading with these experiences and observations:

I met white writers who talked of their responses, who told me how whites reacted to this lurid American scene [caused by racial inequality]. And, as they talked, I'd translate what they said in terms of Bigger's life. But what was more important still, I read their novels. Here, for the first time, I found ways and techniques of gauging meaningfully the effects of American civilization upon the personalities of people. I took these techniques, these ways of seeing and feeling, and twisted them, bent them, adapted them, until they became my ways of apprehending the locked-in life of the Black Belt areas. (517)

By twisting, bending, and adapting Melville's techniques to his own ways of "seeing and feeling," by connecting the prevailing interpretations of Moby-Dick during the 1930s to his own personal knowledge of Bigger, Wright created what Mikhail Bakhtin identifies as a "double-directed discourse," a single narrative expressing antithetical and complementary positions (324). Henry Louis Gates might consequently identify Wright's strategic use of Moby-Dick as a noteworthy example of the African-American writer's exercise of signifying. In Gates's discussion, signifying, as "a metaphor of Afro-American formal revision," "functions to redress an imbalance of power, to clear a space, rhetorically" (124). By signifying on Moby-Dick in Native Son, by revising Moby-Dick to insist on the significance of his story, Wright presents his readers simultaneously with a scathing expose of American racism and a triumphant African-American epic.

In "How 'Bigger' Was Born," Wright maintains that "always, as I wrote, I was both reader and writer" (536). [8] As a writer, he sought "to tell the truth as I saw it and felt it ... to objectify in words some insight derived from my living" (535), but he also sought "to keep before the eyes of the reader at all times the forces and elements against which Bigger was striving" (538). In order to project the truth of Bigger's experience and of American racism as he had seen and felt it, Wright's strategy, I argue, was to align his narrative with the prevailing popular interpretations of Moby-Dick, the work Wright's contemporaries regarded as the great American novel. By establishing that "the forces and elements against which Bigger was striving"--the power of American racism in its manifold social and institutional forms--were as formidable as those against which Ahab strives and that Bigger is as heroic as Ahab in his struggle, Wright guaranteed his reader's attention. In the process, Wright rewrites Melville 's epic, parodying or intensifying--signifying on--wellknown characters, images, and episodes from Moby-Dick, to create an original African-American epic with a new kind of hero, one who, in facing American racism, is challenged as profoundly as any previous epic hero.

Literary critics writing in the 1930s saw Melville's Ahab as a powerful symbol. He was variously perceived as the personification of "a man of forceful character driven by his sombre nature and his bleak heritage, bent on his own destruction and dragging his immediate world down with him" (William Faulkner, qtd. in Parker and Hayford 172); as man's "will, or Ego" (William S. Gleim, qtd. in Parker and Hayford 174); and as man "internally divided. There is a dark unknown realm of his being which he is fearful of fathoming; elements in his own nature frighten him. He struggles to integrate his energies, to bend his powers towards ends he thinks good, despite his half-conscious awareness of ambiguities in his own nature which corrupt that good; but all the while he is uncertain whether he is bound or free" (R. E. Watters, qtd. in Parker and Hayford 183). Mumford, especially, can be seen as providing Wright with a precise blueprint through which Bigger could become "a symbol for all the larger things" when he desc ribes Ahab as embodying "the lonely heroic spirit, who declares himself a sovereign nature" (Golden 149-50), "the spirit of man, small and feeble, but purposeful, that pits its puniness against [the blind, fatal, overpowering energies of existence] and its purpose against the blank senselessness of power" (125).

Given that Melville assigns to Ahab knowledge of the human, natural, and cosmic worlds as well as an ability to manipulate and express this knowledge, Wright's inarticulate and inexperienced youth may seem the antithesis of the Pequod's charismatic and powerful captain. Early in Moby-Dick, Melville prompts his reader's interest in Ahab by anticipating "a mighty pageant creature, formed for noble tragedies" (73), whereas Wright introduces Bigger as a school drop-out, petty thief, and bully. [9] However, despite his position as whaling captain, Ahab, like Bigger, exists in a universe which he regards as rendering him powerless and meaningless--in Mumford's words, "small and feeble." For Ahab, the agent or principal of that universe is Moby Dick, the White Whale; for Bigger, the agent is Mary Dalton, a white girl whom the powerful, wealthy white world "loved and regarded as their symbol of beauty" (188)--i.e., the principal is white society itself. Both Ahab and Bigger, in Mumford's terms, pit themselves agains t "the blank senselessness of power," and in purposefully doing so become heroic.

In their interpretations of Melville's White Whale, literary critics of the 1930s perceived an elemental force--impervious, indestructible and destroying, evil in its indifference to puny man. To R. P. Blackmur, for example, the White Whale is "cold, live evil" (qtd. in Parker and Hayford 171). Mumford's descriptions in The Golden Day and in Herman Melville cast the whale as omnipotent,

a Nature that threatens man and calls forth all his heroic powers, and in the end defeats him with a final lash of the tail.... the White Whale is the sheer brute energy of the universe, which challenges and checks the spirit of man.... and once he comes to close quarters with the creature, there is no issue but death. The White Whale is the external force of Nature and Destiny... . the white whale is the symbol of that persistent force of destruction, that meaningless force, which now figures as the outpouring of a volcano or the atmospheric disruption of a tornado or again as the mere aimless dissipation of unused energy into an unavailable void. (Golden 149-50; Herman 125) [10]

For Percy Boynton, the White Whale is not only "the ghostly mystery of infinitude ... [but also the] symbol of all property and all privilege" (qtd. in Parker and Hayford 179). D. H. Lawrence, while regarding Moby Dick as an elemental power, is alone among Wright's contemporaries in associating Moby Dick specifically with race; he identifies the White Whale as "the deepest blood-being of the white race; he is our deepest blood-nature" (160).

All of these interpretations of Melville's whale might well have intrigued Wright; however, Mumford's interpretation of Moby Dick, in particular, seems to predict Wright's imagery for representing the elemental omnipotence of white society in Bigger's consciousness and thus for establishing Bigger's conflict as an epic struggle. Although Melville constructs Ahab's confrontation in cosmic terms, whereas Wright constructs Bigger's in social terms, Wright mythicizes his narrative through Bigger's experiencing white society as having "the sheer brute energy of the universe," as Mumford had said of Moby Dick; he maintains that "to Bigger and his kind white people were not really people; they were a sort of great natural force, like a stormy sky looming overhead, or like a deep swirling river stretching suddenly at one's feet in the dark" (129). Boris Max, the Communist lawyer who defends Bigger, pleads with the court to acknowledge " 'men and women in whose minds there loom good and bad of such height and weight that they assume proportions of abnormal aspect and construction. When situations like this arise, instead of men feeling that they are facing other men, they feel that they are facing mountains, floods, seas: forces of nature' " (450). Wright describes Bigger's sensation on apprehending whiteness as one of being overpowered by a "sea of noise" produced by "faces, white and looming" (314)--and repeatedly by a "looming mountain of white hate" (333, 344, 418, 494).

Setting his novel in wintertime Chicago, through continuous reference to snow, Wright particularizes his protagonist's consciousness of white society as an elemental force. Beginning in Book I, "Fear," and through Book II, "Flight," snow falls with increasing intensity, coldness, and still indifference, frustrating Bigger's escape and making his capture inevitable. Joyce Anne Joyce argues that, "because snow surrounds, impedes, and betrays Bigger as he flees for his life and because he must fight against it to survive, this image evokes his defiance at the same time that it represents the animosity of the white world," an animosity which she interprets as "malevolence--beastlike in its force" (182). [11]

In his frequent use of the verbal participle looming to describe Bigger's perception of white society's resemblance to an elemental force, Wright obviously evokes Ishmael's apprehension of Moby Dick, the "hooded phantom" that rises "like a snow hill in the hill" (7) at the conclusion of Melville's opening chapter, "Loomings." [12] Wright's reliance upon looming to describe the presence of forces over-whelming to Bigger is especially apparent in the final scene in Book II, in which he narrates Bigger's last desperate minutes of freedom and his long-anticipated confrontation with his assailants. Drawing directly on his reader's familiarity with Moby-Dick, Wright signifies on the climax in Melville's novel, creating a parody of Ahab's final encounter with the White Whale:

[Bigger] looked ahead and saw something huge and round and white looming up in the dark: a bulk rising up sheer from the snow of the roof and swelling in the night, glittering in the glare of the searching knives of light.... He wove among the chimneys, his feet slipping sliding over snow, keeping in mind that white looming bulk which he had glimpsed ahead of him.... He ran to another ledge, past the white looming bulk which towered directly above him, then stopped, blinking: deep down below was a sea of white faces and he saw himself falling, spinning straight down into that ocean of boiling hate. [13] ... He remembered the quick glimpse he had had of the white looming bulk; he looked up. Directly above him, white with snow, was a high water tank with a round flat top. (307-08)

As Melville generates a sense of suspense by delaying Ahab's confrontation with Moby Dick through 132 chapters, Wright arouses his reader's anxiety for Bigger by prolonging the moment of his capture. By postponing the precise identification of the water tower, he places Bigger in the heroic posture of Ahab before the White Whale, thereby encouraging his reader's admiration for him. While the White Whale looms over the narrative of Moby-Dick, Wright reverses Melville's color iconography to give his reader "a Negro Bigger Thomas [who] loom[s] as a symbolic figure of American life, a figure who would hold within the prophecy of our future" ("How" 522).

Wright also draws upon other images of the White Whale in Moby-Dick to convey Bigger's profound antipathy for whiteness and his alienation from white society. Metaphors of both the mask and wall occur through-out Native Son as if in explicit reference to Ahab's well-known quarterdeck speech regarding Moby Dick:

"All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event ... some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me.... I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. The inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate." (164)

In Bigger's desperate flight across rooftops through the snow, the face of one of his pursuers appears "like a piece of white pasteboard" (305), and later Bigger sees Jan Erlone as wearing "a deforming mask" (334). The wall-- or curtain--in Native Son, however, is white society shoved near to Bigger, beyond which he is forbidden to go; a metaphor permeating Native Son, it is also the impenetrable defensive mechanism which white society causes Bigger to create in order to protect himself from all feelings--except hatred and rage. Wright, thus, parodies Ahab's metaphor of power and inscrutability, inverting them to evoke Bigger's powerlessness and to reveal the psychologically catastrophic impact white racism has upon Bigger.

Initially, Melville describes Ahab as masking himself--as presenting himself to the ship owners and his shipmates in the guise of rationality rather than as displaying his irrational obsession, as promoting the commercial interests of the whaling voyage rather than as revealing his audacious desire for vengeance on Moby Dick. Similarly, Wright describes Bigger initially as masking his feelings and his intentions. In the presence of other blacks--his family and friends-- Wright explains, "he lived... behind a wall, a curtain.... he denied himself and acted tough" (9). In the presence of whites, he also denies himself. However, with them, he acts as they demand--with deprecation, complaisance, subservience. Responding to Mr. and Mrs. Dalton, Peggy, and Mary with" 'Yessuh' "and" 'Yessum,' "he is consequently perceived as" 'a quiet colored boy'" (220). Following Mary's murder, as he contrives his plans for a ransom note, and as he finds himself confronting white police and journalists, he persists in acting the role of docile servant; at this point, however, his feelings of impotency are privately transformed into feelings of powerful pride. He believes that the white world cannot imagine that one who is "black and clownlike" (170), "a black, timid Negro" (214), or "a meek black boy like him" (218) would have been able to devise a kidnaping, let alone execute a murder as successfully as he has done.

From Chapter 36, "The Quarter-Deck," on, Ahab no longer wears the mask of rationality and convention, but reveals himself as "madness maddened" (168) and his sole raison d'etre as" 'Death to Moby Dick!' "(166). In contrast to Ahab, however, Bigger, despite yearning to proclaim his actions openly to white society, cannot possibly emerge from behind his wall:

He wanted suddenly to stand up and shout, telling them that he had killed a rich white girl, a girl whose family was known to all of them.... he wished that he could be an idea in their minds; that his black face and the image of his smothering Mary and cutting off her head and burning her could hover before their eyes as a terrible picture of reality which they could see and feel and yet not destroy. (147)

To disclose himself to the white world either as Mary's murderer or as a man eager to accept full responsibility for his actions Bigger knows can only lead to his being "arrested, judged, and executed" (147). Such disclosure in a racist society, Wright establishes, would also result in Bigger's being forced to substitute one pernicious mask for another: the degrading role of boy (the term by which white authority habitually addresses him in the novel) and of servant for one of "black ape" (314). It is a given of Melville's constructed cosmos that Ahab, as a powerful white man, may choose whether or not to conceal his identity, whereas in Bigger's racist society an individual's choices for identity itself are radically curtailed.

Throughout Moby-Dick, Melville deconstructs the iconography of whiteness as a positive cultural value. Thus, in his foreshadowing Moby Dick through the great white squid, he images whiteness as inhuman and incomprehensible: "No perceptible face or front did it have; no conceivable token of either sensation or instinct; but undulated there on the billows, an unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition of life" (276). [14] As Stephen K. George notes, Bigger experiences whiteness as both faceless and formless, hence as devoid of humanity; he argues that it is consequently not only more horrifying to Bigger but also, lacking human features, more readily assaulted.

In addition, Pip, the black cabin boy on the Pequod, at the end of Chapter 40 expresses terror of white squalls, white whales, white men, but primarily of" 'thou big white God aloft there somewhere in yon darkness'" (178). However, it is in the chapter immediately following Chapter 41, "Moby Dick," Chapter 42, "The Whiteness of the Whale," that Melville reverses conventional attitudes toward whiteness's superior virtue. Here Ishmael's scrutiny of his feelings of dread regarding Moby Dick leads him to conclude that it is, above all, whiteness which "by its indefiniteness ... shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe" (195) and causes him to join Ahab's fiery hunt. While Ahab's view of Moby Dick may be both personal and abstract, Melville represents Ishmael's view of the White Whale in the course of the novel as evolving; it comes to appear to him and to the reader as multi-faceted, mutable, incomplete, and ambiguous. In Books I and II of Native Son whiteness dominates Bigger's life int imately and completely; from the novel's beginning, he feels that whites live" 'right down here in my stomach'" (22).

As Wright presents Bigger's blackness continuously contrasted with the whiteness of the snow, of the ghostly Mrs. Dalton, her white cat, her white kitchen, he shows visually how Bigger's environment determines racial categorizations. Whiteness, as ubiquitous socially as Melville claims Moby Dick is in the seas, defines and debases his blackness. Although some white characters in Native Son prove benign in Book III, there is no possible moral ambiguity regarding white racism in Wright's novel. Through his signifying revisions, Wright thus challenges not only Melville's nineteenth-century epistemological deliberations regarding whiteness, but also the negligence of Moby-Dick's critics in the 1930s regarding race, by naming the construction of racial categories as a demonstrable social evil, deeply affecting multiple aspects of American life.

Both Ahab and Bigger, however, have been permanently scarred--mutilated and humiliated, physically and psychologically--by the power of whiteness. In Ahab's case, external mutilation precedes internal mutilation; the White Whale having taken his leg, Ahab's "torn body and gashed soul bled into one another" (185), leaving him "gnawed within and scorched without" (186). His scars are visible--a "slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish" (123), darts down his face and neck--and he stands on a white whalebone stump instead of a leg. Although Melville gives his reader the option of understanding the first of these scars as a natural birthmark, he presents both of them as symbolically signifying Ahab's human limitations, his imperfection, his incompleteness. It is his missing leg, however, which prompts Ahab to identify with Moby Dick "not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperation ... all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race" (184).

As if signifying on Melville's general reference to "race" here as designating the black race in particular, Wright shows the source of Bigger's "bodily woes [and] intellectual and spiritual exasperation" to be the white race. Bigger's scars, thus, are not symbolic of a general human condition; they are the peculiarly painful manifestations of racism as practiced in the United States. In "How 'Bigger' Was Born," Wright claims the necessity of his representing Bigger's "relationship with white America, both North and South,... a relationship whose effects are carried by every Negro, like scars, somewhere in his body and mind" (529). Unlike Ahab, Bigger bears no visible, bodily scars. However, Wright repeatedly indicates that white society's negative perceptions of blackness cause Bigger to regard his body as eradicated and deformed:

They made him feel his black skin by just standing there looking at him .... He felt he had no physical existence at all right then; he was something he hated, the badge of shame which he knew was attached to a black skin.... He felt naked, transparent; he felt that this white man, having helped to put him down, having helped to deform him, held him up now to look at him and be amused. (76)

From the beginning of Native Son, this sense of blackness as "a badge of shame" results in psychological scars as devastating as physical scars, despite their invisibility. [15] Bigger, too, feels his incompleteness and his limitations: "Never in all his life, with this black skin of his, had the two worlds, thought and feeling, will and mind, aspiration and satisfaction, been together; never had he felt a sense of wholeness" (278). As Ahab piles upon Moby Dick "the sum of all the rage and hate felt by his whole race," Bigger transfers the anger and "a dumb, cold, and inarticulate hate" (76) felt by the whole black race upon Mary Dalton and Jan Erlone.

Following Melville's lead, [16] Wright associates fire with his protagonist's destructive capabilities. Although Kinnamon points to earlier appearances of fire in Wright's work, [17] the grisly decapitation of Mary's head and her burning in the furnace in Native Son seem reminiscent of the burning of the whale's body in Moby-Dick's try-works scene. The differences between the two episodes are significant: Melville's scene occurs in a single chapter, whereas Wright twice brings Bigger back to the scene of his crime; Melville's style is idiosyncratic and allusive, whereas Wright's description borders on the sensational and journalistic. However, the scenes in both novels, in their shared details, evoke a vision of the Inferno, and Wright, through a Melvillean parody, elevates the terror of a black man above the sensational and journalistic.

Thus Melville's memorable description of the "Pequod ... laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness" (423) can be said to anticipate Wright's description of Bigger's visit to the fiery furnace following Mary's incineration:

The inside of the furnace breathed and quivered in the grip of fiery coals.... The coals had the appearance of having burnt the body beneath, leaving the glowing embers formed into a shell of red hotness.... He shut the door and pulled the lever for more coal.... the oblong mound of red fire turned gradually black. (134)

The smoke of the try-works is "horrible to inhale,...it has an unspeakable, wild, Hindoo odor about it, such as may lurk in the vicinity of funereal pyres. It smells like the left wing of the day of judgment; it is an argument for the pit" (422). In the Dalton basement, "the smoke was rolling from the furnace now in heavy billowing grey clouds, filling the basement. Bigger backed away, catching a lungful of smoke. He bent over, coughing. He heard the men coughing.... [He] opened the lower door of the furnace.

The smoke surged out, thick and acrid. God-damn!" (249). Observing the whale's burning are the watch, who look into "the red heat of the fire until their eyes felt scorched in their heads. Their tawny features, now all begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards, and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these were strangely revealed" (423); in the "red darkness" of the basement, Bigger sees "Mr. Dalton and another white man ... their faces ... white discs of danger" (176). As the "savage" harpooners stoke the fires of the try-works, so Bigger, perceived by the white men who regard him as a savage, attempts to stir the ashes in the furnace. Echoes of Melville's incantatory prose are apparent in Wright's account of Bigger, who "despite the smoke and his burning eyes and heaving chest, was flexed taut" (250).

In both Moby-Dick and Native Son, this physical scene of hellish fire and smoke comes to serve as an analogue for a hellish psychological state. [18] The frightening, solipsistic condition it conveys is projected in both novels as nightmare. In Moby-Dick, Ishmael, while standing at the Pequod's helm, is so mesmerized by his hellish vision of the try-works blazing in front of him that he fails to heed his course and is nearly responsible for capsizing the ship. Melville, consequently, warns his reader: "Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy hand on the helm!" (424). His warning is particularly applicable to Ahab, whose personal obsession makes the flaming Pequod "the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander's soul" (423). In Native Son, the vision of the Inferno, as Bigger later remembers it, suggests the culmination of his terror. In a lengthy periodic sentence, comparable to Melville's evocation of the try-works as Ahab's counterpart, Wright describes this horror. Ha unted by the memory of Mary's bloody head and the furnace, in a terrifying dream, Bigger projects his own dread of dying onto her head:

... he stood on a street corner in a red glare of light like that which came from the furnace and he had a big package in his arms so wet and slippery and heavy that he could scarcely hold onto it and he wanted to know what was in the package and he stopped near an alley corner and unwrapped it and the paper fell away and he saw--it was his own head ... (189)

Although Bigger's nightmare concludes with his throwing the head defiantly into a crowd of whites, later Wright implies that the nightmare has come to possess Bigger: "He himself was a huge furnace now through which no air could go; and the fear that surged into his stomach, filling him, choking him, was like the fumes of smoke" (251). Both Ahab and Bigger look too long into the fires of their obsessions; Ahab consequently is blinded by his perception of his individual invincibility, as is Bigger by his sudden perception of his individual power. Ahab, thus, causes the death of his entire crew (save Ishmael), while Bigger follows Mary's murder with the rape and murder of his black girlfriend, Bessie Mears. An action appalling to a 1990s feminist reader of Native Son, Bigger's second murder might have been more readily interpreted by the 1940s reader as a extension of the infernal nightmare characterizing his life and as a consequence of his alienation from other human beings. Melville aggrandizes Ahab's identi ty for his reader through his affiliation with the fiery Prometheus, Milton's Satan, and Goethe's Faust, but Wright, through Bigger's association with the fiery Ahab, intensifies the horror of his desperation and of his actions.

In their feelings of rage and hate, in their commitment to death and destruction, both Ahab and Bigger alienate themselves from their fellows even as their courage and defiance position them for heroism. Ahab, taking advantage of the captain's prerogative to exclusivity, keeps himself aloof from the mates and harpooners in his cabin and at table; he also separates himself from gains with other ship captains, thereby depriving his crew of the opportunities for socializing. But it is, above all, his generalized, disdainful, and cynical regard for other human beings which keeps him separated from his shipmates. Only in Moby-Dick's last chapters does he demonstrate any concern for the well-being of others--Pip and Starbuck. That concern dissipates, however, with the appearance of the White Whale, and Ahab's last words," Oh, lonely death on lonely life!'" (571) describe his own as well as Bigger's final isolation.

Ahab's separation from others is primarily his choice; Bigger, too, chooses to separate himself from others. Convinced of their blindness and of his superior comprehension, with increasing arrogance and contempt, Bigger intentionally allows his defensive wall or curtain to distance himself from other blacks. Wright makes clear to his readers, however, that Bigger's intentional alienation from blacks is related to the social and institutional privileging of whites in all American economic, legal, educational, and political situations. The resulting physical separation, which is a condition in Bigger's life rather than a choice, Wright describes with precision in "How 'Bigger' Was Born":

In Dixie there are two worlds, the white world and the black world, and they are physically separated. There are white schools and black schools, white churches and black churches, white businesses and black businesses, white graveyards and black graveyards, and, for all I know, a white God and a black God .... (510)

In both Native Son and "How 'Bigger' Was Born," Wright indicates that this physical alienation, which results in the psychological alienation from other human beings he defines as a "No Man's Land," is a condition of Bigger's life.

For Melville as well as for Wright, the question of the individual's free will is of paramount importance. From his opening chapter, Melville indicates that, although an individual such as Ishmael may choose to go to sea, "those stage managers, the Fates" (7), also inevitably dictate his course of action. In the Epilogue, Ishmael notes again that "I was he whom the Fates ordained to take the place of Ahab's bowsman" (573). Numerous instances throughout Moby-Dick, all involving diverse characters, reveal a universe in which forces beyond human comprehension or control intersect with individual decisions to shape an individual destiny. [19] Ahab, however, in his refusal to acknowledge any authority, acts out a national agenda of freedom, guaranteed by the Declaration of Independence and re-inscribed by nineteenth-century Emersonian concepts and Jacksonian models. Unlike Bigger, who has internalized his limitations and incompleteness, Ahab has been conditioned to believe in his freedom--he has "been led to think untraditionally and independently" (73). Again and again, he asserts his free will: "'I'd strike the sun if it insulted me'" (164); "'What I've dared, I've willed; and what I've willed, I'll do!'" (168). Repeatedly he denies signs and portents prophesying the disastrous consequences of seeking the White Whale. If he momentarily questions, "'What nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it ... that commands me? ... Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm?'" answering himself that "'we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike'" (545), as the narrative moves toward its conclusion, he rationalizes his actions by proclaiming that he himself has become the agent of Fate. On the second day of the chase, he actually announces, "'I am the Fates' lieutenant; I act under orders'" (561). Ahab's outrageous, hubristic defiance of Fate, interpreted by recent literary critics as indicative of his fascistic or imperialistic tendencies, was perceived by Mumford and other 193 0s literary critics as a grand gesture, an expression fulfilling high human aspirations and elevating a human being to heroic status.

In titling Book III of Native Son "Fate," Wright alludes to the theological and mythic traditions of divine predetermination--Homeric, Calvinistic, Hindu--within which Melville sets his drama. However, for Wright, rather than an inscrutable abstraction, Fate is an entrenched sociological construct. It is the social environment which shapes an individual. In "How 'Bigger' Was Born," Wright asserts, "I don't mean to say that I think that environment makes consciousness (I suppose God makes that, if there is a God), but I do say that I felt and still feel that the environment supplies the instrumentalities through which the organism expresses itself" (516). In Native Son, racism is the particular implacable instrumentality which controls and conditions all aspects of Bigger's life--his home, school, job, play, friends; the workplace, the church, the police, the courts, the media. Max, in beginning his appeal to the court on Bigger's behalf, describes the impact of this doctrine on Bigger in clinical terms:

"The complex forces of society have isolated here for us a symbol, a test symbol. The prejudices of men have stained this symbol, like a germ stained for examination under the microscope. The unremitting hate of men has given us a psychological distance that will enable us to see this tiny social symbol in relation to our whole sick social organism." (444-45)

As a result of the effectiveness not only of Max's defense but also of Wright's representation of the devastating impact of racism on black American life in general and on Bigger's character in particular, critics of Native Son, since the time of its publication, have continuously read it in relation to either literary naturalism, political Marxism, or sociological behaviorism, thus persistently comparing it to An American Tragedy and Grapes of Wrath. [20] However, as Bigger resists the Daltons' and Britten's classification of him as boy and ape, he also resists Max's reduction of him to "a tiny social symbol" and his life to a sociological experiment, thereby resisting Fate as social environment even as Ahab had, in Mumford's terms, resisted the White Whale as "Nature and Fate." Similarly, Wright himself can be said to defy the critical fashion of allying Native Son with the naturalistic and social protest literary traditions, [21] allowing Bigger's actions to be interpreted as heroic and allying his novel with Moby-Dick as grand epic.

Both Ahab and Bigger are doomed to die, overpowered by whiteness, but both project themselves at the conclusions of their narratives as indomitable individuals. Although early in the novel Bigger tells Gus that "'sometimes I feel like something awful's going to happen to me'" (21), as if acquiescing to a feeling of fatalism, immediately after Mary's murder, he discovers the "hidden meaning of his life ... an obscure but deep debt to fulfil to himself in accepting the deed" (119); he experiences "a kind of eagerness ... a confidence, a fulness, a freedom; his whole life was caught up in a supreme and meaningful act" (131). Wright thus represents Bigger as discovering a purpose for living comparable to that which Mumford perceives as motivating Ahab--a purpose which allows the individual to "hew meaning and form from the blank stone of experience" (128).

In "Fate," as Bigger begins to find the language to conceptualize a new identity--of himself as a whole individual, as an individual capable of claiming his own actions, his own life, his own destiny--he rejects the Fate that had been prescribed for him. He refuses to allow himself to be classified by the Daltons as a "'boy,' "by State Attorney Buckley as a" 'worthless ape,'" or by Max as a social symbol. He grasps the value of his own particular life: "He saw and felt but one life, and that one life was more than a sleep, a dream; life was all life had" (418). Wright's description of Bigger's realization resonates with Mumford's conviction that Ahab "stands for human purpose in its highest expression" (Herman 128), the expression of "Life, Life purposive, Life formative, Life expressive ... more than living, as living itself is more than the finding of a livelihood" (129). In his final words to Max, Bigger asserts the meaningfulness and value of his life clearly and movingly:

"I ain't trying to forgive nobody and I ain't asking for nobody to forgive me. I ain't going to cry.... I didn't want to kill! But what I killed for, I am! ... What I killed for must've been good! ... 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, Mr. Max. I can say it now, 'cause I'm going to die." (501)

Like Ahab in his final speech, Bigger's "topmost greatness lies in [his] topmost grief" (Moby-Dick 571). As Mumford implies, "there is no struggle so permanent and so humanly satisfactory as Ahab's struggle with the white whale. In that defeat, in that succession of defeats, is the only pledge of man's ultimate victory" (Herman 129); in Bigger's defeat Wright also paradoxically places his protagonist's victory as the basis for his heroism.

In "How 'Bigger' Was Born," Wright testifies that he ended Native Son as h e had started it, "showing Bigger living dangerously, taking his life into his hands, accepting what life had made him" (538). In Book III, however, Wright develops Bigger's character in the interest of making him "a symbol of larger things." Unlike Ahab, who denies Pip's and Starbuck's pleas that he turn away from the White Whale at the conclusion of Moby-Dick, Bigger's last words express his desire to develop a friendship with Jan, a friendship resembling that between Ishmael and the dark-skinned Queequeg. Although Bigger emphatically validates his murders in the novel's last scene in terms of his own identity and life and therefore separates himself from Max's ideology, Wright demonstrates, in the course of Book III, his protagonist's increasing recognition of his bonds with other human beings. No longer feeling alienated from either black or white people, he realizes that his actions have caused others--his family, the Daltons, and Jan--to suffer; he grieves that Bessie's death will not be given the same value as Mary's; he appreciates the fact that Max takes him seriously, allowing him to speak honestly, listening to him, defending him. If Bigger recognizes his affiliation with individuals, Wright also indicates he comes to believe that he shares in a common human condition of feeling and yearning.

In Wright's representation of Bigger's expanded understanding of himself in a context transcending racial construction, Bigger necessarily must alter his perception of whiteness. It is Jan who initially is responsible for Bigger's changed perception as it is Queequeg who, at the outset of Moby-Dick, provides the catalyst for Ishmael's experiencing "a melting in [him]" so that "no more [his] splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world" (51), so that he renounces racial, religious, and ethnic dichotomies for friendship. It is Jan who gives an individual, human face to the omnipotent, elemental force with which Bigger had associated whiteness. [22] It is Jan who allows Bigger to strike through the pasteboard mask of whiteness to discover that a suffering person lies beyond the wall of inscrutability:

Suddenly this white man had come up to him, flung aside the curtain and walked into the room of his life. Jan had spoken a declaration of friendship that would make other white men hate him: a particle of white rock had detached itself from that looming mountain of white hate and rolled down the slope, stopping still at his feet.... He saw Jan as though someone had performed an operation on his eyes, or as though someone had snatched a deforming mask from Jan's face. (333-34)

As Queequeg's friendship may be interpreted as a prelude to Ishmael's feeling of good will toward his fellow human beings, Jan's friendship with Bigger precipitates his feeling of equality and unity with others. In both MobyDick and Native Son, these feelings, expressed through an outreaching of hands, culminate in a vision. Melville describes Ishmael's vision as occurring in the process of squeezing spermaceti in the open air with his crewmates:

I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it. ... Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,--Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! (416)

The language and imagery of Wright's description of Bigger's vision reverberate with allusions to Ishmael's experiences and to Melville's reference to the "shock of recognition" which he insists brothers (and geniuses) feel. [23] However, Bigger, alone in the darkness of his prison cell, must imagine his connections with others, whereas Ishmael's comrades, in a situation antithetical to Bigger's, surround him. Thus Wright once more signifies on Melville, thereby intensifying the power and the wonder of Bigger's vision for those of his readers familiar with Moby-Dick:

...if he reached out with his hands and touched other people, reached out through these stone walls and felt other hands connected with other hearts--if he did that, would there be a reply, a shock? ... Just to know that they were there and warm! ... And in that touch, response of recognition, there would be union, identity; there would be a supporting oneness, a wholeness which had been denied him all his life. ... [He imagined] he was standing in the midst of a vast crowd of men, white men and black men and all men, and the sun's rays melted away the many differences, the colors, the clothes, and drew what was common and good upward toward the sun .... (419-20)

Bigger thus thrusts through the wall in his prison vision and, unlike Ahab, finally discovers not "outrageous strength" and "inscrutable malice," but a common good.

By positioning Native Son in relation to Moby-Dick, Wright depended on a "shock of recognition" from his readers. The concluding paragraph of "How 'Bigger' Was Born" implies that Wright perceived his novel to be the legitimate heir of those nineteenth-century novels whose authors--Poe, Hawthorne, James--literary critics had already canonized by 1940. He expresses his conviction that novels focusing on the tragic past and the ongoing, horrifying oppression in black American lives, as his own Native Son does, expand revealingly upon the premises of these earlier writers. He might also have identified the significant continuity of the "power of blackness" between these nineteenth-century novels and Native Son--not "the power of blackness" as defined by Melville as "that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin" ("Hawthorne" 540) but as revised by himself in his novel to project the ability of black Americans to create new lives and new art. Mumford's praise of Melville sets forth the challenge whi ch Wright met eagerly in preparing to revise MobyDick and develop his own epic novel:

In the very creation of Moby-Dick [sic], Melville conquered the white whale that threatened him: instead of horror there was significance, instead of aimless energy there was purpose, and instead of random power there was meaningful life. The universe is inscrutable, unfathomable, overwhelming--like the white whale and his element. Art in the broad sense of all humanizing effort is man's answer to this condition. (Herman 127)

In the creation of Native Son, Wright conquers the white racism that threatened him and his protagonist; he presents his novel and his hero as the purposeful and meaningful answer to this horrifying and overwhelming condition in the specific tradition of American literature and "in the broad sense of all humanizing effort."

Elizabeth Schultz is Professor of English at the University of Kansas and a former contributor to African American Review.

Notes

(1.) See, for example, Baker; Crouser; Andrews; and Reising.

(2.) See Canby; Fisher. Keneth Kinnamon observes that, in addition to these novels, "several reviewers likened Wright to the socially conscious novelists Erskine Caldwell, Charles Dickens, James T. Farrell, Maxim Gorky, and Harriet Beecher Stowe" ("How" 125).

(3.) The index of A Richard Wright Bibliography: Fifty Years of Criticism and Commentary, 1933-1982, compiled by Keneth Kinnamon, with the help of Joseph Benson, Michel Fabre, and Craig Werner, is essential for identifying essays concerning source studies for Native Son. For recent essays pointing to Wright's sources, see Fleming; Foley; and Sisney.

(4.) Following the Melville Revival, which was initiated by the publication of Raymond Weaver's biography in 1921, there was an abrupt rise not only in new publications of Melville's works, many with illustrations for diverse audiences, but also in critical studies of them. Willard Thorp's introduction to Representative Selections of Melville's works in 1938 is frequently cited as responsible for accelerating the interest in Melville (see Bryant, Companion ix, 800). It is noteworthy that, although the young black protagonist of Langston Hughes's Not Without Laughter (1930) is described as reading Moby-Dick, he doesn't finish it (248).

(5.) Although Robert Bone in The Negro Novel in America recognizes a connection between Moby-Dick and Native Son, he does not develop it; to my knowledge, only Barry Gross subsequently has noted parallels between the books. My interpretation of Wright's use of Melville differs significantly from Gross's. Arnold Rampersad notes that "Wright may be seen as a Melvillean, with 'Benito Cereno' forming a kind of prediction of Native Son--that is, with Babo predicting Bigger Thomas" (166), but he does not identify a connection between Moby-Dick and Native Son.

(6.) In an appendix, Fabre also includes Wright's 1947 review of E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel, in which he discusses Forster's critical commentary on Moby-Dick, observing in conclusion that, "after analyzing Moby Dick for its many meanings, he [Forster] confesses (Americans can be proud that he pays Melville the highest tribute to be found in his book): 'Nothing can be stated about Moby Dick except that it is a contest. The rest is song ... Melville--after the initial roughness of his realism--reaches straight back into the universal, to a blackness and sadness so transcending our own that they are undistinguishable from glory' "(202).

(7.) Wright's association with Mumford went back as far as 1936, when Mumford published Wright's "first real success in fiction ... 'Big Boy Leaves Home' " in The New Caravan, an anthology which Mumford edited (see Kinnamon, Emergence 67-68).

(8.) David Bradley mentions that Wright in Native Son was teaching a "culturally illiterate" audience how to read, as Melville was in Moby-Dick (136).

(9.) Bigger, engaging in the fantasy game he and Gus call "Playing White," imagines himself assuming the positions of powerful white men--in finance, politics, and the military.

(10.) Given Wright's close friendship with Ralph Ellison at the time he was writing Native Son and Ellison's use of The Golden Day in Invisible Man, it is tempting to think that Wright might have introduced Ellison to Mumford's work. Ellison ironically names the roadhouse where his young narrator first comes to associate an overwhelming horror with whiteness "The Golden Day." There, the Invisible Man feels "suddenly a mass of whiteness was looming two inches from my eyes; it was only his face but I felt a shudder of nameless horror.... He was like a formless white death" (84-85).

(11.) Joyce notes that "the last forty-two pages of Book 2, which encompass events from the discovery of Mary's bones to Bigger's capture, contain no fewer than sixty-one references to snow" (182).

(12.) In addition, note that, in the car with Mary and Jan, Bigger feels himself to be "sitting between two vast white looming walls" (77), and the Daltons' "house loom[s] white and silent" (131).

(13.) At this moment, Bigger's experience resembles Ishmael's dizzying sensation of feeling himself fall from the ship's mast-head into the ocean. Although both experiences conjure up death, Melville equates Ishmael's with transcendental, Platonic exploration, whereas Bigger is on the verge of being lynched.

(14.) Ishmael's sense of the essential facelessness of the sperm whale is repeated later in Moby-Dick. "How understand his head? much more, how comprehend his face, when face he has none? ... hint what you will about his face, I say again he has no face" (379).

(15.) "How 'Bigger' Was Born" gives an account of the torture performed by white police on black boys, beating them "in places that leave no scars" (533).

(16.) Ahab most notably is aligned with fire in Chapter 119, "The Candles," in which he addresses the corpusants: "'Oh, thou clear spirit, of thy fire thou madest me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee' " (507).

(17.) "Fire," writes Kinnamon, "figures prominently in such early poems as 'Between the World and Me,' 'Everywhere Burning Waters Rise,' and 'Obsession,' as well as three of the four stories of Uncle Tom's Children.... Black Boy begins its narrative of Wright's early life with the episode of his setting fire to his house at the age of four. The central event in the plot of The Long Dream is a terrible fire in a black night club based on the actual holocaust of the Rhythm Nite Club in Natchez in 1940" ("How" 117).

(18.) Both Ahab, who testifies that he is " 'damned in the midst of Paradise' " (167), and Bigger seem avatars of Milton's Satan: "Me miserable! which way shall I fly / Infinite wrath, and infinite despair? / Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell" (Paradise Lost IV.73-75).

(19.) Consider, for example, Elijah's role in relation to Ishmael's selection of the Pequod as the ship of choice for him and Queequeg, the mat-weaving, the first lowering, and Queequeg in his coffin.

(20.) The Index for A Richard Wright Bibliography: Fifty Years of Criticism and Commentary, 1933-1982, lists sixty-seven entries on Steinbeck (including forty-five on Grapes of Wrath) for 1940 and twenty-six on Dreiser (including fifteen on An American Tragedy) for 1940.

(21.) Fabre explains persuasively that Wright was "inspired by two literary traditions: that of American realism, as exemplified by Dreiser's American Tragedy, and the Russian existentialism of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment' (Unfinished 171). A recent essay by Robert J. Butler argues for Wright's following in the tradition of French naturalism.

(22.) George notes the revelation of Jan's face to Bigger and its importance to the process of his growing vision of himself (501-02).

(23.) This well-known phrase occurs in Melville's essay "Hawthorne and His Mosses" 547. It became the title for Edmund Wilson's study of the relationships among American writers, The Shock of Recognition (1943).

Works Cited

Abcarian, Richard, ed. Richard Wright's Native Son: A Critical Handbook. Belmont: Wadsworth, 1970.

Andrews, William L. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1986.

Appiah, K. A., and Henry Louis Gates, ed. Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad, 1993.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Dialogic Imagination. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.

Baker, Houston, Long Black Song. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1972.

Bone, Robert. The Negro Novel in America. New Haven: Yale UP, 1958.

Bradley, David. "Race, Reader, and Moby-Dick. Bryant and Milder 119-46.

Bryant, John, ed. A Companion to Melville Studies. Westport: Greenwood P, 1986.

Bryant, John, and Robert Milder, eds. Melville's Evermoving Dawn: Centennial Essays. Kent: Kent State UP, 1997.

Butler, Robert J. "Wright's Native Son and Two Novels by Zola: A Comparative Study." Black American Literature Forum 20 (1986): 9-25.

Canby, Henry Seidel. "Book-of-the-Month Club News." 1940. Abcarian 37-39.

Crouser, G. Thomas. American Autobiography: The Prophetic Mode. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1979.

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. 1952. New York: Vintage, 1972.

Fabre, Michel. Richard Wright: Books & Writers. Oxford: U of Mississippi P, 1990.

--. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: Morrow, 1973.

Fisher, Dorothy Canfield. "Introduction to the First Edition of Native Son." 1940. Abcarian 39-41.

Fleming, Robert, "O'Neill's Hairy Ape as a Source for Native Son." CLA Journal 28 (June 1985): 434-43.

Foley, Barbara. "The Politics of Poetics: Ideology and Narrative Form in An American Tragedy and Native Son." Appiah and Gates 188-99.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988.

George, Stephen K. "The Horror of Bigger Thomas: The Perception of Form without Face in Richard Wright's Native Son." African American Review 31 (1997): 497-504.

Gross, Barry. "Art and Act: The Example of Richard Wright." Obsidian 2.2 (1976): 5-19.

Hughes, Langston. Not Without Laughter. 1930. London: Collier, 1969.

Joyce, Joyce Anne. "The Figurative Web of Native Son." Appiah and Gates 171-87.

Kinnamon, Keneth. The Emergence of Richard Wright: A Study in Literature and Society. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1972.

--. "How Native Son Was Born." Appiah and Gates 110-31.

Kinnamon, Keneth, with Joseph Benson, Michel Fabre, and Craig Werner. A Richard Wright Bibliography: Fifty Years of Criticism and Commentary, 1933-1982. Westport: Greenwood P, 1988.

Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature. New York: Viking P, 1961.

Melville, Herman. "Hawthorne and His Mosses." Moby-Dick. Ed. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker. New York: Norton, 1967. 535-51.

--. Moby-Dick. Evanston: Northwestern UP and Newberry Library, 1988.

Mumford, Lewis. The Golden Day: A Study in American Experience and Culture. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1926.

--. Herman Melville: A Study of His Life and Vision. 1929. New York: Harcourt, 1962.

Parker, Hershel, and Harrison Hayford, eds. Moby-Dick as Doubloon: Essays and Extracts, 1851-1970. New York: Norton, 1970.

Rampersad, Arnold. "Shadow and Veil: Melville and Modern Black Consciousness." Bryant and Milder 162-77.

Reising, Russell J. The Usable Past: Theory and the Study of American Literature. New York: Methuen, 1986.

Sisney, Mary F. "The Power and Horror of Whiteness: Wright and Ellison Respond to Poe." CLA Journal 29 (Sep. 1985): 82-90.

Wright, Richard. "E. M. Forster Anatomizes the Novel." 1947. Fabre, Richard 201-03.

--. "How 'Bigger' Was Born," 1940. Native Son 503-40.

--. Native Son. 1940. Ed. Arnold Rampersad. New York: HarperPerennial, 1993.

--. "Personalism." 1935-37?. Kinnamon, Bibliography 16.