I hated this book. With a passion. I wanted to fling it across the room the entire time I was reading it. I hated the characters - especially the female ones. They nittered and twittered about with their hands clasped at their chest, or one hand flung across the forehead as they fainted, saying 'oh deary me'. Bessie let herself be cowed repeatedly by Bigger, and Mrs Dalton was just kind of their. The only semi-good female character in the book died. Then I couldn't stand Bigger and his internal monologue either. And I hated the way he ran away, not because he ran away, but they way he did it.
What he should have done, after he fled the scene of his crime, was waited for the police to search a section of the city and then gone and hid in that section, rather than trying to stay ahead of them. Once people have searched a section, they tend to think that it's clear. At the climax, when the policeman is coming onto the roof and Bigger hits him with his gun, he should have remained hidden. The policeman would have gone away and Bigger would have been safe. But no, by attacking that man, he sealed his fate.
Another problem I had with the book was the freaking twenty or so page long speech that Mr Max gave to the court. Most of that was unnecessary and just him repeating himself. What he was trying to say was convoluted, and I didn't get much of it, although I may have just been distracted by the fact that I wanted to fling the book across the room.
What the book is trying to say is a little confusing. I read a bit of the afterward before I got bored, and it said, I think, that the author wanted to portray Bigger as kind of the image that the whites saw. I believe he said that it's purpose was to shock people or something like that. I could go look. The book is sitting over on the coffee table, but that's a lot of work. If he meant to shock, I suppose he managed that. I don't know if I was "shocked" persay, but I was certainly frustrated by the characters and how they dealt with things. And then he threw in Communism on top of race, and it seemed like he was trying to do a little bit to much.
Yup, I really didn't like this book.
