Native Son: Genre 1 key example

Bigger's imagination is fundamental to the novel. The novel also has a very secular worldview. Bigger never really believes in God with any conviction, and Reverend Hammond is a sort of parody of overly zealous southern Black priests. And when Bigger sees, after his incarceration, a burning cross on the roof of a building, he loses all faith in God. He even shouts to Hammond, "I don't have a soul!" All of these aspects are typical of Modernism, which was the first major literary movement to really embrace secular worldviews. Native Son, published in 1940, is rather late in the modernist timeline. For its widespread use of irony and satire, and its time of publication, it could also be described as an early text in American postmodernism.

Native Son is also a protest novel. This subgenre, also called the "social novel," describes works that use the form of the novel to make a political stance, often in such a way that flattens character and plot to support that stance. Bigger is not meant to be a perfectly wrought character; he is meant to be a representation of a certain type of man, a flawed actor in a deplorable system. Wright's focus is to use Bigger to describe the system of racism that controls his actions. It is also a psychological novel, in that Bigger's perception and imagination is one of the prime concerns of the novel. Wright often slips directly into Bigger's mind, and the entire book is shown through Bigger's eyes; the novel thus investigates the way he sees the world. 

Native Son is also part of the long tradition of the crime novel, and it shows qualities of detective novels and thrillers. Despite its politically charged subject, the main conflict and source of excitement in Books 1 and 2 are Bigger's crimes, the psychology that leads to them, their investigation, and Bigger's flight from the authorities. Wright carefully paces the release of information in Book 1 in order to build tension until Mary's murder. Book 2, then, is a reversed detective story: the reader knows who did the murder, and the story concerns the authorities trying to find the culprit. These two books rely on tropes of these genres: red herrings, hard-nose investigators, a helpless and morally upstanding victim.

Book 3 is similar to other books of its time, such as other social novels about race from the early 20th century like Their Eyes Were Watching God and To Kill a Mockingbird, the latter of which ends with a trial in which a well-meaning white lawyer defends the Black protagonist. Wright's trial is more extended, though, because Native Son is the most intentionally political novel of these three; he uses Book 3 to elaborate at length his political stance, described only through implication in the first two books.