The Man Who Lived Underground

“The Man Who Lived Underground” is a short story written by Black American writer Richard Wright. He originally conceived it as a novel. However, when he failed to secure a publisher, he shortened the story for publication in the literary journal Accent in 1942. A longer version was published as a novella in 1945 in Cross Section: A Collection of New American Writing. Wright died two months before the story’s inclusion in a 1961 anthology of his short stories called Eight Men. Wright’s original novel of the story was published in 2021.

Set in an unnamed American city in the 1940s, the story follows Fred Daniels, a Black man who has been wrongly accused of murdering a white woman. After being forced to sign a false confession, Fred escapes the police and literally goes underground, sneaking into the sewer system. He grapples with his understanding of the realities of the world above him while confronting the new realities of existing underground. Through the genre of realism, the story explores guilt, freedom, racial prejudice, religion, materialism, and identity in America.

This guide uses the version of the short story published in the 2008 edition of Eight Men.

The story is narrated from a third-person limited point of view. It begins with Fred on the run and looking for a place to hide. He feels like he has awoken from a dream. To avoid a car that’s about to hit him, he opens a utility access hole cover and goes inside. He climbs down the prongs used by sewer workers and then falls into a violent current of water. Everything seems strange to him underground, and he grabs a pole to use as a guide as he wanders the sewer, his eyes adjusting to the dim light.

Fred hears music and arrives at a Black church. He spies on the parishioners through cracks in the wall. As he listens to the singing choir, Fred is confused by their need to repent sins and proclaim their innocence. However, he realizes that he too has recently run from the police after pleading with the officers to believe his innocence. He recognizes his sense of guilt and wonders why he can’t shake the dread he feels even for a crime he didn’t commit. He doesn’t know how long he has been down in the sewer and begins to lose his sense of time. Still, he feels drawn to staying in the sewer and decides to use his time there to plot his escape.

Continuing his journey through the sewer, Fred is horrified to discover an infant floating in the water. He tries to save it only to realize it’s dead. The baby gets stuck in garbage, and Fred feels ashamed. He shivers and pushes the baby away so that the water can carry it onward. He thinks about the beating the police gave him before forcing him to sign a confession he didn’t even read. Then, he sleeps. Upon waking, he decides he needs to leave the sewer, though he’s afraid of what the police will do.

Cold and hungry, he digs and pokes at a brick wall until he sees an undertaker preparing a corpse for burial. A dead white man lies on a white table, with a black coffin next to him. Fred chuckles at the realization that the racial and sexual prejudices of society aboveground don’t exist in death and finds in this distinction a sense of justice. Before leaving the funeral home, Fred happens upon a toolbox. He takes a hammer, nails, a crowbar, a light bulb, and electrical wiring.

Fred then sneaks into a movie theater, where he collects sandwiches from an elderly coal-bin worker and finds more tools. Fred finds the movie theater a place of disillusionment and pities the audience, as he recognizes that they’re asleep even while awake. Like the churchgoers, they aren’t experiencing real life. An usher mistakes Fred for one of them and points him to the washroom. Returning to the sewer, Fred finds a nice cave to dwell in. He falls asleep and dreams of walking on water and rescuing a baby from a woman who’s drowning. He saves the baby at first but not the woman before the baby disappears and he feels that he himself is drowning.

Upon waking up, he starts digging again until he hears a typing sound above him. It’s a typewriter in an office. Using a screwdriver, he opens a crack in the office and sees a white hand putting money into a safe. He decides he can watch for the combination of the safe and give himself a purpose to stay underground.

Next, Fred wanders into a radio shop. He steals a radio and takes it back to his cave, intending to hook it up and listen to music. However, all he hears on the radio are depressing news stories about war, destruction, crime, and hatred. Fred associates all these things with the aboveground world, which reinforces his decision to stay below and live unfettered. Fred feels more at peace with his conscience. Shortly after hearing the radio news of World War II battles, Fred has a dream in which he witnesses his own dead body.

He scrapes his way into the building next to the office with the safe and finds himself in a butcher shop, where the smell of fresh meat disgusts him. He waits for the butcher to leave and then grabs his cleaver and takes several pieces of fruit. While smoking a cigarette, he goes to look out the door, feeling stuck between the aboveground world and the one he’s living in underground. A white couple appears at the door; assuming he’s an employee, they ask Fred to sell them some fruit. Panicked, he agrees to do the transaction, being overly polite to them. When they leave, he walks out of the store. However, he sees his “wanted” photo in a newspaper with a headline about the police hunting a Black man for murder. Feeling naked and condemned and being unable to prove his innocence especially since he signed a confession, he goes back in the store, grabs the cleaver, and retreats underground.

He starts to remove bricks from the basement of the building with the safe in it. After making a hole big enough to squeeze through, he enters a stairwell leading to a door. Upon opening it, he sees a white girl standing in front of a steel cabinet. She screams at him, and he races back down to his hole. However, he then decides to go up and make sure that room is the one with the safe in it. Through the cracks, he sees the safe behind the girl. He decides to wait there and watch for someone to turn the code on the safe.

Eventually, Fred witnesses a thief unlocking the safe and stealing money. Fred has no desire to spend the money; he merely wants to possess it for the sport of stealing it. Watching the thief, though, he feels the money is rightfully his, not the thief’s. After all, the thief, unlike Fred, is likely to spend the money on himself. Once the thief leaves, Fred decides to open the safe and take anything remaining. He finds money, coins, jewelry, and jars full of diamonds. Holding the money, he thinks about how much power it has aboveground. He pockets only the hundred-dollar bills. Then, he sits at the desk and starts typing his name on the typewriter: freddaniels, no spaces. The typewriter too is a tool used only by the men who live aboveground, those who condemned him. Wandering through the office, he realizes that he’s in a jewelry store. Fred steals the gun from a sleeping security guard and is delighted by the power he feels. He doesn’t use the gun, though, or plan to use it. Instead, he takes his loot—typewriter and all—back to the cave, convinced that all the objects he has taken and all the visions he’s seen underground somehow add up to a deeper meaning.

In his cave, he sets up the typewriter but realizes that he can’t remember his own name or why he lives underground. He has some vague vision of running from the police but nothing else. He writes a sentence about it being a long, hot day and then impersonates a person who’d work in an office. The stolen cash and jewelry have no intrinsic value to him; instead, he uses it all to adorn the walls of his cave. He nails the objects to the cave walls and carpets the cave floor in diamonds. This act makes him feel free for the first time, reinforcing his devalued view of material objects. Then, he fires the gun before he empties the diamonds into a heap on the floor and plays a game in which he pretends he’s a rich man aboveground. However, after a bit, he starts to worry he’s going crazy and fears that he may do something dangerous. He turns on the radio and listens to the news as he conjures a vivid vision of soldiers at war. Fred walks back and forth through his hole, wondering why he’s having such strong and weird thoughts, and eventually realizes he needs to return aboveground.

He retraces his steps through the sewer, eager to assuage his guilt. First, he goes to the church, where he feels the urge to tell everyone there that they’re wrong. Then, he watches as a little boy is whipped for stealing the radio Fred took. Fred sees this as a positive, as he hopes the boy will wake up to the realities of the world just as Fred has. He smiles and moves on to the jewelry store, where he sees the same three police officers who forced a false confession from him. They’re interrogating the security guard, Thompson, accusing him of robbing the safe. They threaten him and then beat him unconscious and walk away. Fred watches as Thompson regains consciousness and grabs a gun from a drawer. Thompson shoots himself in the head, and the police agree that his suicide is proof that he was guilty. Fred is overwhelmed and stands frozen for what seems to him an eternity.

He returns aboveground, where he’s yelled at for blocking traffic. He passes a police officer, who doesn’t pay attention to him. He then finds the church he saw from underground. He wants to tell them something, but he doesn’t know what. The members of the church throw him out for being covered in sewage and disrupting the service. He sheds his feelings of guilt, realizing that it’s an inherently human emotion regardless of whether a person is innocent. He resolves to go to the police station and clear everything up. There, he can’t find the words to ask what he wants. The police officers he talks to assume he’s crazy, and then he remembers the name of Mrs. Peabody. He worked for Mrs. Wooten, her neighbor. The officers take him up to meet the police he met before, the same ones who forced his confession and later confronted Thompson: Lawson, Murphy, and Johnson. Of them, only Murphy remembers Fred. They explain to Fred that it’s all been a misunderstanding and that he’s free to go home; an Italian man has been arrested for the murder. Fred starts to tell them what he did underground, but the police burn his confession and tell him everything is okay.

However, Fred won’t accept this and insists that he wants to sign a new confession. He then tells them that he witnessed Thompson’s interactions with them and his suicide. This disturbs the police officers, and they escort him to a patrol car. He tells them more about his life underground, and they decide he’s probably nuts because he’s a Black man who must live in a white man’s world. They make racial remarks to him, which Fred ignores as he offers to show them his underground cave. They arrive at the sewer, and Fred descends. Lawson shoots Fred in the chest, and Fred hears them say that his kind must be killed because they’d ruin everything. He watches the utility access hole cover get replaced, closes his eyes, and lets the sewer current carry him away.