For Better or For Worse

Hello my fellow blog readers, Shakespearean Taj is back! How art thou?! Yeah, that is about all I have got. Anyway, what I really wanted to come talk about was assimilation. From my knowledge, assimilation is the process of comprehending an idea and / or any type of information. After reading the novel Native Son by Richard Wright, I have noticed the benefits and downsides of assimilation and how it ultimately shaped this particular novel as a whole. One of the main characters, named Jan, undergoes assimilation, that results in a positive manner, when his girlfriend is killed. When Jan finds out his mistress (see what I did there) is killed by the protagonist, who he was acquainted with, he came to an understanding that it was what society made out of him that overall pushed him to commit such a crime. By being able to understand this very idea, he found the courage to in fact reach out to the protagonist and defend him on his trial, even though he was guilty. However, assimilation that results in a negative manner is when the protagonist kills his first person. Too bad this book was not a tragedy because Shakespeare would not treat me like this.

Okay so in this novel, the protagonist, Bigger Thomas, ends up killing the daughter of a wealthy white family, at this point, he experiences a sense of control over his life that he has never felt before. This idea of gaining control through killing someone leads to him actually killing another character in the novel, which then leads to various other consequences. As a whole, this comes to show that assimilation is almost always the reason for one’s path to enlightenment or path to corruption. Fair thee well!