. . . because I could always get out of it by suicide or desertion: these ultimate possibles are those which must always be present for us when there is a question of envisaging a situation" (54).
In envisaging the situation in which Bigger Thomas finds himself, Wright makes the set of choices available to Bigger almost as constricted as the soldier's choices in Sartre's example. Poverty and the lack of education and opportunity are basic elements in Bigger's constricted life. But Wright chose to create a character who was not so much defeated by his circumstances as utterly bewildered by the question of his own existence. Wright gives form to Bigger's existential dread by means of the images of whiteness and suffocation that are evoked at every crisis point in the novel. Bigger's state of mind is conveyed by means of this constant allusion to whiteness yet Bigger himself is not engaged in creating a metaphor for anything. His perceptions of whiteness have symbolic status for Wright and are actual phenomena for Bigger. Whether he is suffocati
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