Throughout her interactions with Bigger, Bessie is frightened and her attempts at a seductive beauty are fairly transparent. She is reluctantly dragged into Bigger's criminal activity and Bigger ultimately rapes and kills her. Bessie Mearsīessie is Bigger's alcoholic girlfriend. In the end, Jan commissions his friend, Boris Max, to defend Bigger. Jan's idealism is nearly shattered in the wake of Mary's murder, but he comes to a facile understanding of Bigger's crime, purely in terms of Communism and racist poverty. His idealism is naïve to a fault often times, Jan's orthodoxy and reliance upon images and 'symbols' get in the way of his well-meaning attempts to produce a real change. Jan ErloneĪ young communist, Jan is the boyfriend of Mary Dalton. Max, is on hand during Bigger's final hours, assisting him in his final struggle to find worth in his existence. Doomed to the electric chair, Bigger's lot in the judicial system is little improved despite the assistance of the Communist 'Public Defenders.' Nonetheless, the defense attorney, Boris A. The flight motif, developed during Book Two, hearkens back to the rat that Bigger kills in the opening scene and by the novel's end, Bigger's fate is equally grim. Midway through the novel, Bigger's rape/murder of his girlfriend, Bessie Mears, seals his fate and he is soon apprehended by the authorities. While Bigger is willing to brutalize his fellow gang members, his killing of the multi-millionaire heiress, Mary Dalton, is purely accidental. Bigger's anger and pride alternate to determine much of the novel's beginning. The rough conditions of South Side life are dramatized at the beginning of the novel when Bigger is roused awake by his mother and younger siblings so that he might kill a yellow-fanged rat. The protagonist of the novel, Bigger Thomas is twenty years old, living in one of the many slum apartments of Chicago's predominantly-black South Side.

Native son pages