utside forces who could care less about him. He has been lied to until he believes the lies he tells himself. He has no place in society. His own mother believes in him no more than the billboard reading "you can't win" that he sees each day outside his apartment. He has grown up in an environment where enormous rats fester in holes and water is a maybe situation, where meals are precarious and money is almost nonexistent, and where he is told time and time again that he has no worth, no dignity, no intelligence or creativity. Is it any wonder that Bigger is violent? It seems more fantastic that all of the people around him are not. When he says, upon reading the paper "No! Jan didn't help me! He didn't have a damned thing to do with it! I -- I did it!" (p.283) he is clinging to the act of violence he performed as an affirmation of self. He is isolated by a blind society, he is loved by no one, he has never been given a chance to explore who and what he is. His attitude of "why care?" is rather to be expected, predicted, than wondered over. He is not a good person, he is not noble or true or brilliantly creative. But he has the capacity for all of those things, and has not been given the chance to fulfill them. His crime of violence is as much the crime of the people around him, who stifled his soul and nourished the other, baser side of him that was the only way he had of self-expression. ...
