Money Can’t Buy Me Happiness?
The idea that monetary success cannot buy you happiness has been circulated through popular culture, spanning from the Beatles popular song, “Money Can’t Buy Me Love” to a quote from Rousseau, a philosopher of the 18 th century. In Wright’s Novel, Native Son , the reader is faced with the question of the meaning of happiness. In Bigger’s case, he thinks that being part of the “real world” will allow him to experience this emotion. Not only is Bigger effected by concentrated poverty, but due to lack of education, racial segregation, redlining, and racial bias in the working world, his hopes of joining the people in what he sees as reality, have become impossible. The environment in which Wright places Bigger Thomas is crucial to the plot of the story, as is implied by the author himself. The city of Chicago is dazzling with all the opportunities it seems to offer its community. Bigger encounters the “real world” through newspapers and movies, seeing the idealized version of the wor