39 pages • 1 hour read
Big Black Good Man
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Character Analysis
Olaf Jensen
Olaf Jensen is an old, Danish white man who is one night short of his sixtieth birthday. Olaf is a night porter, a job that brings him into contact with many kinds of people and to which he is suited after a life spent as a sailor and soldier. Olaf is an average person who doesn’t have much money but has enough and has worries that ordinary people have, including rowdy guests, how to please his wife, and how to deal with his boss. All of that changes with the encounter with Jim, a black sailor who stays at the hotel. The interaction with Jim forces Olaf to confront his own racism and to affirm in a deep way his proclaimed egalitarianism.
During the encounters with Jim, the ordinarily placid Olaf becomes emotional and has wild revenge fantasies about Jim’s ship sinking and sea animals devouring Jim. These fantasies move closer to the realm of reality when Olaf reaches for his gun as his fear of Jim overwhelms him. The nadir of the feelings Olaf experiences during encounters with Jim come when Olaf urinates on himself once he is convinced Jim intends to kill him. Essentially, being in the presence of Jim diminishes Olaf’s perception of himself and makes him feel less of a man.
The final evolution in Olaf’s character comes in his epiphany that Jim is, after all, a good person. It takes external action—Jim’s gifting of the shirts—for this change to occur in Olaf, however. The story ends on this high note, signaling that there is perhaps hope for the Olafs of the world who mean well but find themselves carried away by white supremacist thoughts in spite of themselves.
Jim
Jim is a confident, powerfully-built black man who is a sailor and exhibits all the physical traits associated with stereotypical black masculinity. He is tall, has a wide grin, has quite dark skin, has eyes that are hard to see, has big hands, and is sexually potent.
Wright also uses action to characterize Jim as a person. What little the reader knows about Jim is that he is a successful man who takes pride in his appearance and that he is generous. This latter trait is revealed only at the end of the story when he gives the shirts to Olaf almost a year later, presumably because he is grateful for the assistance Olaf gave him, not least of which is introducing Jim to Lena. His response to Olaf’s outlandish reaction to him—a deadpan joke and compassion—is further proof of his generosity.
Jim changes little throughout the story, so he is a relatively static character who mostly serves to stimulate change in Olaf, the protagonist of the story. The contrast between the large psychical space he occupies in Olaf’s mind and the slightness of his actual actions and words highlights the same dynamic in white supremacist reactions to people of color.
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By Richard Wright
