I Can Only Be Me

An identity is defined as a person's conception and expression of their own self but what does that mean? Richard Wright poses many questions of finding ones else in his stories. The main question is who is Bigger Thomas? He has a name, a family and a house but what is his identity? The funny thing is is he does not even know the answer to that question. Throughout Native Son, a bildungsroman by Richard Wright, Bigger struggles to find himself in an oppressive white society. We know he is a black and that he hates his family. He hates his family because he cannot help them. Bigger cannot succeed  in the world that he lives in because he is a black man and the whites only see him as what his stereotypes are. Eventually, Bigger became his stereotypes and bottled all his anger from years and years of being oppressed. Many say that an identity is what someone makes for himself but I do not think that is the case here. Bigger is product of his environment. This environment is the source of his fear. Bigger is afraid to be anything other than the stereotypes the whites set because he was told his life that he could not be anything else. People are what society wants them to be. Society influences people more than we realize because there are so many aspects to it. Teenagers are influenced by social media. Parents are influenced by bills and so on. Bigger has so much fear in his life that his only outlet is violence. Everything he does is because of how he grew up. He grew up being told that he was had to be and never given the opportunity to show any other side of himself. That is not a real identity. That is not a choice. The audience does not know the real Bigger Thomas because Bigger does not know who he is. We all have an identity but is it our own or the one society made for us? My mother used to tell me that I could only be myself in this life but I do not really believe that is the case. There are so many influences in the world around and society creates the people that are "needed" in the world. In Bigger's world, someone had to be the person everyone hates and could be a scapegoat for things not going as planned and unfortunately that scapegoat was Bigger. Society created the monster we all saw him as but he did not start that way. Monsters are created not born. People start out good but when society touches them, everything is changed.