Native Son: Metaphors 5 key examples

This is a very effective metaphor for the problem of American racism: the white people spread and take all available places to live, including within the black body. Bigger thinks about white people all the time: they have taken up residence in his psyche. They make him hopelessly angry: they have taken up residence in his emotions, too, in the pit inside his stomach and in the fire in his throat.

Bigger makes the problem of racism very physical, even biological. The philosophical problem of American racism is that Black bodies can be exploited, harmed, and killed without retribution, which is not true of white bodies. Bigger's use of the body in the metaphor pulls this very corporeal dimension of racism to the fore. Gus's claim—that white people live in his throat, and "sometimes you can't hardly breathe"—rings horribly true in the history of police violence in this country.

And the metaphor clarifies that another problem of racism is where an individual lives. That is, for white people, choosing where to live is a question of which street to live on: whether to live in a so-called "good" or "bad" neighborhood. As far as white people are concerned, Gus is right: where white people live is on Cottage Grove Avenue. But for Black men like Bigger and Gus, the problem exists not just in real estate but inside the physical body.

This is a highly strange metaphor.  The image of the thread slung over a gulf with Bigger hanging off it only uses white and black and no other colors, like many of Wright's images. This colorless quality of so much of the book emphasizes how Bigger sees the world: a mixture of discrete sections of white and black, never to be able to interact kindly or safely. In addition, here the white thread connotes Bessie's purity, stored in her breath and life. For her to die, it seems at this point in Book Two, would be either from suicide or murder, so her continued life is a thing of purity, a white thread stretching far. The black gulf looms below, for Bessie and Bigger. This image need not make any sense: Bigger is clearly not thinking straight. But this metaphor suggests that Bessie's breath is a pure white thread, stretching over a deep black chasm of near death.

Bigger, hanging from the thread, is perilously close to falling in, too. What exactly it would mean for him to fall down in "the rocks far below" is also unclear. Does Wright mean to imply that Bigger's fall would be him stooping to murder or dying himself?

This is one of the most uncomfortable and horrific passages in the novel. Bigger has become increasingly convinced, throughout Book 2, that he has no choice over his actions, and that his life is only the deterministic result of the world of racism that controls him. Bigger certainly sexually assaulted Mary before he killed her, but the actual content of his actions are not in concern here. Bigger realizes that the nervous, powerful energy he feels around white people is always a kind of violence. Rape, his term for all the feelings of angry enmity he feels toward white people, to him, is a natural and biological response. Bigger wants to present a threat of violence so that he can feel perversely safer and less afraid of violence from the white "pack."

Bigger describes this using a metaphor in the last sentence of the above passage. The image in the metaphor is visceral and disgusting: Bigger's violence is a consequence of physics, as he is pulled taut; he believes that he had no agency in the matter, and that he is only an inanimate object manipulated by other hands.

Bigger feels that he has a "hard central core" of action and anger. This held him together while the "white mountain" loomed over him. The white mountain was used earlier in the novel: Bigger referred to Jan's kindness, meeting with him in his cell after the inquisition, as a rock that rolled off the "white mountain of hate." But now, while Bigger once felt that "the white mountain" was the dominating feature of his life, now it is death, "a different and bigger adversary." 

Through all the black-and-white images in the novel, there is a strange and ever-changing relationship between whiteness, blackness, and moral goodness and badness. The colors morph and change to take on multiple associations in the novel. In this one, though, blackness has the familiar association of death. Bigger, in the most explicit way in the novel, connotes blackness and death—in other words, he finds that to be Black is, in a way, a death sentence. This is what Bigger means when he feels "the hard central core of what he had lived." He comes to believe that to be Black is to "fight" against the white mountain until the black wall of death takes him.

This is not, as Bigger implies, the first time he has felt that he was "balanced on a hairline." Just a few days before, when he was trying to convince Bessie to flee Chicago with him, he argued with her on a street corner in the snow: "He held his body in an attitude that suggested he was delicately balanced on a hairline, waiting to see if she would push him forward or draw him back." Bigger uses this metaphor to describe when he feels as if multiple futures are possible and he does not know what will happen. And, when balanced on a hairline, Bigger cannot stay still; he has to go one way or the other lest he fall.

In the previous instance with Bessie, Bigger had to make a choice between his ransom scheme with the Daltons and an escape to safety. He also had to decide between staying with his love and the chance of total freedom. Bessie, in that instance, draws him back, and Bigger stays in Chicago to attempt to collect the money from the Daltons, leading to his arrest. (The reader wishes for Bessie's sake she had made a different decision when Bigger balanced on that first hairline, perhaps saving her life.)

But here, in the prison cell, Bigger makes a bigger choice: hope or hate, whether to walk to his death with anger or acceptance. He knows he cannot avoid the choice: that would mean "living and dying in a fog of fear." Bigger is at last coming to understand his own need for action and conviction at all times. He cannot waffle in his decision. But he also realizes that this is the only choice in his short life that he makes entirely for himself. In his entire life up to that point he was controlled by structures beyond his control: racism, employment, his family, and the church all made Bigger feel like his life was out of his hands. But in this final choice, Bigger realizes "there was no one to push him forward or backward, no one to make him feel he had any value or worth—no one but himself." This metaphor, then, is very powerful: Wright uses it twice to show the central development in the book, as Bigger learns that he can make independent choices, pushing and pulling himself, as he balances on a hairline.