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Richard Wright's Native Son begins and ends with death. In the opening scene Bigger Thoma kills a big rat in the kitchenette living with his mom and his siblings. The rat is a symbol of the living conditions of urban black people and a foreshadowing metaphor for Bigger's fate. Bigger is incapable of nonracial thinking because of his obsession with his own black skin. He thinks and acts with aggressions and atrocities as a way of getting out of racial pain or escaping all the negatives in his life. Bigger's ultimate act of violence is to cut off Mary's head. Bigger's defamation of Mary's dead body represents the deconstruction of body as a biological device of racial segregation. Mary's head in his nightmare which Bigger hacked off is a reflection of his own head. The substitution of his head for Mary's means the possibility of interchangeability
between subject and object, murderer and murdered, oppressor and oppressed. After he kills
Mary he thinks his murder is an act of creation. The fear and shame and hate which white
people make rise so hard and hot in Bigger have cooled and softened. (Chung-Ang University)