Macon is Bigger?
In the opening of the novel, Macon refers to himself as wanting to be the “white Bigger Thomas”. To readers of Native Son , this is a pretty jarring comparison. For people that haven’t read the novel, here is a very short summary (if you have, feel free to skip this paragraph): Bigger Thomas, the main character of Native Son , is a black man living in Chicago in the 30s. By a series of events out of his control, he finds himself in the room of a rich white girl while she is passed out drunk. He is trying to put her to bed when her blind mother comes into the room. Bigger knows that if either he or the girl makes a single noise, the mother will figure out who is in the room, and from her upper-class-white-afraid-of-black-men perspective, it would look incredibly bad, and the result would probably be lynching or some other vigilante execution. So, to save his own life, he covers the girls face with a pillow to prevent her from talking, and accidentally suffocates her.