Marxist Criticism "Native Son" a Essay

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Max is one of the central characters of the novel when it comes to the issues of Marxism because he blames capitalism entirely for the inequality of blacks; he believes that it is capitalism that has kept the black people oppressed. Max tries to show the jury that the case is not just about one black man and one black woman, but rather, it is about millions of blacks that have been kept down, all the while desperately trying to rise to the class status that white people have.

Marx and Engels speculated that literature reflects and sustains the material life of a society. To look at this idea and apply it Wright's use of the novel, we can see that the material conditions of Bigger's life -- what he ate, how he made money, what he did for work, determined his ideas. Furthermore, Mr. Dalton's material conditions determined his ideas too. Both characters cannot see the connection between Dalton's money and Bigger's poverty.

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The authority of the ruling class is maintained when the working class is kept ignorant. The conscience of the ruling class is soothed when its members address the economic problems of a mass of people with individualistic charity. Wright seems to be using Native Son as a way to show his readers the association between wealth and poverty. This is does clearly with images of the stereotyped blacks, depicted as rather savage, and the urbane whites, and the reality of that unjust gap in wealth.

Wright, using Marxist sentiments, seems to be saying through his novel that social conditions, especially conditions where there is deprivation of certain people or people, motivates people to act "against their nature" (Marx 11) or in anti-social ways.

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