28 pages • 56 minutes read
The Man Who Lived Underground
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Literary Devices
Distorted Imagery
Imagery is the use of figurative or metaphorical language to describe events in a story to convey a physical sense them. Often, imagery involves adjectives and adverbs to describe something, but imagery can also make use of metaphors, similes, and other devices. Distorted imagery is imagery based on taking normal objects or sights and transforming them in a way that makes them otherworldly or unusual.
In “The Man Who Lived Underground,” Wright uses various images to convey Fred’s reality. Most of the story is really told through Fred’s eyes and concerns the things he watches from the sewer. The world of the underground is one of darkness and haze with occasional glimpses of light, such as “the yellow stems from another manhole cover” (26) that shine light on the dead baby. In the sewer, he sees “a stagnant pool of green sludge” (26) with an occasional pocket of air distorting it and creating a “glistening… bluish-purple bubble” (26-7). All images that Fred sees become similarly distorted, and the well-lit things reveal eerie images of death such as the dead baby or the “blood-red liquid” (28) hovering above the corpse in the undertaker’s shop. In the sewer, poorly lit images take on a clarity for Fred as he notices, for instance, how pointless money is when it’s free of the import it carries aboveground. He instead uses the bills as wallpaper, creating another distorted image.
All these distorted images add up to something in Fred’s brain that he can’t quite make sense of. They stand “out sharply in his mind,” but he’s unable to make them “have meaning for others” (79) like they have for him. The use of such distorted imagery adds to the story’s theme of Fred rejecting the certainty for the aboveground world for the clarity he gains underground—clarity that admits the full complexity and haziness of reality.
Irony
Irony is a literary device that uses contradiction to reveal a reality other than what is expected or assumed to be true. It rests on an expectation and understanding of one thing and then having the opposite occur. Irony can take the place of an unpredicted outcome, a behavior that seems out of character, or something that just doesn’t seem to fit.
“The Man Who Lived Underground” is ironic in its setup. Fred must go underground and into the darkness to see the reality of the aboveground world. He finds meaning in the world above him by hiding in his cave, where the things that matter in the real world no longer matter. Money and jewelry, for example, become mere decorations despite the theft of them being a “reason for staying here in the underground” (36). (It’s also ironic that someone else breaks into the safe that Fred is so desperate to rob.) A gun becomes something that merely deafens him and briefly flashes “an orange-blue spurt of flame” (55) rather than something with dire consequences (like the one Thompson uses on himself or the one Lawson uses on Fred). Those endings contain additional irony. While a false confession sends Fred underground, an accusation against Thompson for a crime Fred did commit leads Thompson to end his own life. The irony is that the things Fred does want to confess to get him killed by the same officers who originally made him confess to a crime he didn’t commit. Another irony is that Fred starts the story trying to “elude” the police but ends up delivering himself to them.
The effect of irony on the story, then, is that it reveals the paradox of the world. He who understands the complexity of the world and can embrace the gray areas must be destroyed lest he “wreck things” for everyone else. The ironic ending is that the titular “man who lived underground” dies there.
Foreshadowing
Foreshadowing, which hints at something that comes later in a story, is used to create suspense or dramatic tension. It can help provide orientation within a story, as it anticipates certain outcomes.
Throughout “The Man Who Lived Underground,” Wright foreshadows Fred’s fate. The first instance is the dead baby floating in the sewer water and “snagged by debris” (26). This is the same fate Fred later meets, as his body too is carried away by the sewer water upon his death. Similarly, he’s covered in the filth of the sewer when he journeys aboveground to reveal the secrets he has learned. That is, the sewer has snagged him even when he’s free of it.
Similarly, what Fred witnesses in the various buildings foreshadows other events in the story. The lack of salvation he experiences watching the church service foreshadows his being thrown out of the same church for being filthy. The sight of the corpse on the table at the “undertaker’s establishment” is another indication of Fred’s future. Most importantly, Thompson’s interrogation, beating, and eventual death by gunshot foreshadow Fred’s own fate. He has already been interrogated, beaten, and accused by the same men before the story starts, so the only part of the story missing is his death. While Thompson uses his own gun on himself because of the cops, they directly shoot Fred and kill him. Fred even seems to predict this fate. Early in the story, he dreams of drowning trying to save a live baby in the sewer, and before returning aboveground, he feels a “cold dread at the thought of the actions he knew he would perform” (65) in the “cruel sunshine” of the aboveground. His attempts to sacrifice himself for the baby—and, by extension, all Black people—by telling the truth about what he has seen ends in the death that was foreshadowed throughout the story. The use of foreshadowing implies that Fred’s fate was sealed, possibly from birth.
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By Richard Wright
