Final Analytical Essay

While everybody has fears, how we deal with them is completely different. Do you control your fear or does fear control you? In Richard Wright's Native Son, Bigger's fear of the whites controls him. "Fear" is a perfect title for the first book because it is Bigger's fear that drives him in the first section.

Bigger's fear of the whites drives him to fight Gus, which is one of the first scenes of Bigger’s violence in the first section of the book. Because Gus was the only person in their gang to hesitate about robbing Blum's, and Bigger secretly knew that his pride was in Gus' hands, "he had transferred his fear of whites to Gus" (27). He fought Gus as a way to get out of robbing Blum's with the excuse that Gus was late and it was already too late to go with plans. "He hoped the fight he had had with Gus covered up what he was trying to hide" (46), which was his fear of having to rob a white man's store. It was his fear of the whites that drove him to kill Mary Dalton. Since Bigger feared being caught in a white woman's bedroom in the middle of the night. When Mrs. Dalton came into the room a "hysterical horror seized him" (97), so he put a pillow over her head so that she wouldn't make any noise and draw Mary's mom closer to him. His fear of getting caught drove him to press the pillow so hard that it suffocated Mary and killed her. Then, "confidence could only come again through action so violent that it would make him forget" (31), therefore he decided to get rid of the body and burned Mary's body in the furnace. He saw this as the only option he had because getting caught and being found guilty of a white woman's murder was something that he didn't want to happen. In conclusion, most of the action in the first part of the book "Fear" was due to Bigger's fear of whites. Therefore, "Fear" is an appropriate title for the first book. Bigger was unable to control his fears, "the moment a situation became so that it extracted something of him, he rebelled" (47), and therefore it were his fears that were in control of the action of the first section of the book, not Bigger.