Native Son Symbolism, Imagery & Allegory

In the opening scene of the novel, Bigger must confront a rat in his family’s one-room apartment. He overcomes the rat by throwing a shoe at it and killing it. Some critics argued that the ra...

In Book One: Fear (1.291), Bigger and Gus "play white," demonstrating how powerful they think whites are and how trapped they feel in their own lives. When they finish, the young men watch as a pig...

After Bigger kills Mary, the image of her severed head with blood soaking her hair keeps returning to haunt him. As he opens the furnace to see if her body has burned, it appears to him as if the c...

After being questioned by Britten, Bigger has a dream where he’s running away after being warned by a tolling church bell. He’s carrying a heavy package. This whole scene is bathed in a...

Snow starts falling after Bigger kills Mary and burns her body in the furnace. It continues to fall until he’s captured. This could been seen as a symbol of white society enveloping and overw...

Mrs. Dalton’s literal blindness serves as a metaphor for white folks’ social and cultural blindness. Just as she couldn’t see that Bigger was in the room with her daughter, or tha...

For the Reverend Hammond, the cross represents life. The wood is carved from a tree, which represents the world; and on the cross is a suffering man. Reverend Hammond believes that life is sufferin...