Trapped by a hostile social environment, Bigger is alienated from both the black and the white community. When he is fortunate enough to get a “decent job” as a chauffeur for the white family, the Daltons, he still perceives their Daltonism, their color blindness that accounts for their inability to really see him.¹⁷ Even Mary, their “open minded” daughter, makes him feel insecure whenever she strives to treat him as her equal, thus signaling the racial/social gap between them. As some critics have suggested, although he kills Mary by accident, his act might be fully intended. Moreover, he becomes estranged from his girl friend, Bessie, whom he later rapes and then kills for fear that she would tell on him.

By means of the above questions and remarks, my intention was not just to sketch once more Bigger’s portrait, but mostly to draw attention to the feeling of universal dispossession that Wright constantly inflicts upon his character. The writer himself underlines that Bigger Thomas “is the product of a dislocated society,” that “he is a dispossessed and disinherited man” (Introduction 2000, 15). Hence, the motto of his novel pointing to the emblematic story of the Biblical Job—whose loss functions as a test of faith:

Even today is my complaint rebellious,

My stroke is heavier than my groaning (32).

Bigger’s dispossession should be considered both in a social and economic context, as well as from a cultural and religious perspective. As most critics have suggested, his failure to be integrated into the system is mostly due to the very system that is responsible for Bigger’s psychological developement.¹⁸ More than that, Bigger is dispossessed of human assistance, as he dangerously inhabits an emotional wasteland. He has no real friend to show understanding and compassion, the only exceptions being his girl friend, Bessie, the communist, Jan, and his advocate, Max, who finally strives to comprehend his behavior. As we follow Bigger’s tempestuous race, all the other characters fade into mere sketches, lose their concrete-ness, and no longer interact with him. In such a Sartrean, existential novel, the individual is left alone and there is no prospect to transcend subjectivity.

If we read A Lesson Before Dying within Native Son’s frame, we observe that Gaines’ book opens with the same motif of crime and punishment with which Wright’s novel ends. In prison, Jefferson embodies a new version of Native Son: a lonely, victimized, and orphaned character. Job’s complaint is even truer in Jefferson’s case, since he is a naïve young hero who suffers undeservedly.¹⁹ Even if he is accidentally involved in the shooting of a white man, even if the defense calls him “an innocent bystander,” the prosecutor keeps stressing his premeditated crime, placing his story in a stereotypical scenario where he presumably plays the role of the “bad Nigger.”²⁰ His attempt to establish the truth is useless, his testimony does not count:

A white man had been killed during a robbery, and though two of the robbers had been killed on the spot, one had been captured, and he, too, would have to die. Though he told them no, he had nothing to do with it, that he was on his way to the White Rabbit Bar and Lounge when Brother and Bear drove up beside him and offered him a ride. After he got into the car, they asked him if he had any money. When he told them he didn’t have a solitary dime, it was then that Brother and Bear started talking credit, saying that old Gropé should not mind crediting them a pint since he knew them well, and he knew that the grinding season was coming soon, and they would be able to pay him back then (4).

The above scene reminds us of another instance in Native Son, in which Bigger’s pals, (Gus, Jack, and G. H.) are the same sort of troublemakers as Jefferson’s friends, (Brother and Bear). Still, while Bigger plans together with his friends to rob a white man’s shop, this never happens, and their desire to play white is left unfulfilled. What is just hinted at in Wright’s novel actually takes place in Gaines’ story. Here Jefferson’s mates do not commit a premeditated crime, since their only intention is to have a drink. Unfortunately, as the white storekeeper refuses to offer them alcohol, they shoot and kill each other. Left alone at the site of the crime, Jefferson acts unintentionally, in a state of prostrated bewilderment. His half-conscious decision of having a drink and getting the money from the counter stigmatizes him in the white people’s eyes as a criminal, a drunkard, and a robber.

Without a social and moral status, Jefferson suffers another form of dispossession: he is deprived of his intelligence, his manhood, and his humanity.²¹ Significantly, this blow does not come from the prosecution, but from the defense that uses the argument of his racial inferiority as the very proof of his lack of guilt.²² In front of a racially mixed audience, the court-appointed attorney invokes Jefferson’s racial inferiority as an argument for his innocence. He thus brings forth the reductive perspectives upon the Africans that have been perpetuated by the works of such philosophers as David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Friedrich Hegel.²³ The zoomorphic attributes that the attorney manages to imprint on Jefferson’s identity—“a cornered animal,” “a hog” (7)—disclose his internalization of the white prejudices. Intertextually, these attributes evoke another scene in Wright’s novel, where Buckley, the prosecuting attorney, repeatedly calls Bigger a “half-human black,” a “thing,” a “beast,” and a “fiend” (403). In addition, the newspapers proliferate an animal-like image of Bigger, a demonized version of a criminal and rapist whom the enraged whites desire to lynch.²⁴