28 pages • 56 minutes read
The Man Who Lived Underground
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Themes
Agency Through Storytelling
Among the items that Fred steals and is excited to have in his underground cave is a typewriter he steals from an office. Other than tools and food, it’s the only stolen item he uses for its intended purpose. The cash and jewelry, for example, he uses simply to decorate his cave as neither has any use in the underground. He does fire the gun but aims it at nothing; he fires it simply to experience the sensation of firing it. The typewriter, however, Fred uses to type. He sees it as one of “the serious toys of the men who lived in the dead world” (47) of the aboveground and eagerly types his own name on the paper: “freddaniels.” Later, after forgetting his name, he starts to write the beginning of a story and even takes the time to learn to make spaces on the typewriter: “It was a long hot day” (53). Fred doesn’t understand what he’s typing or why, wanting “merely the ritual of performing” (53) the act of typing, but it’s telling that he doesn’t just type numbers or random words. Instead, he types what could well begin a story, perhaps his own.
Fred loses his own narrative as he spends time underground, dissembling from a person who remembers what the police did to him and why he’s on the run into a person who appears crazy to the outside world. By the story’s end, he’s trying to tell others what happened to him underground and what he experienced, but he can’t articulate it. He tries to “muster all the sprawling images that floated in him” but is unable to “make them have the meaning for others that they had for him” (79). However, he does get at least one key detail out, even if it isn’t the feeling he wishes he could convey to the churchgoers or the police. He tells the police that he “saw the night watchman blow his brains out because” they “accused him of stealing” (76). This is what leads the police to shoot Fred because “his kind” needs to be killed or “they’d wreck everything” (84). His kind is those who have experienced a life other than the one aboveground—and who have a story to tell, one that reveals a truth that can otherwise be learned only through experience. Earlier in the story, Fred hopes the beating of the boy in the radio shop will “bring to the boy’s attention, for the first time in his life, the secret of his existence” (61). However, by telling his own story—were he able to articulate it the way he felt it—Fred might make others aware of the truth without needing to live it. Of course, the problem is his inability to gain the agency he’s so close to grasping either because the psychic horror of the world leaves his brain too jumbled to articulate the words or because society at large doesn’t want to hear stories from Fred other than the false confessions it writes and makes him sign.
Race as a Death Sentence
Death hovers in nearly every paragraph of “The Man Who Lived Underground.” The story’s impetus is the death of Mrs. Peabody, and the story ends with Fred’s own death. Death haunts Fred at all points between. Among the first images he sees in the sewer is a dead baby floating in the water. The image transfixes him, leaving Fred “feeling that had been staring for all eternity at the ripples of veined water skimming impersonally over the shriveled limbs” (26) of the baby. In addition, Fred feels “condemned” by the image, like he felt when “the policemen had accused him” (26). “Condemn” is a word with two meanings, both of which apply to what Fred feels. One of its meanings is to disapprove of someone or censure them; the other is to sentence one to death. Because of his race, Fred has been condemned in both ways since he was born, and the image of the dead baby awakens in him the sensation he’s felt.
Moving through the sewer, Fred encounters death again when he visits an undertaker’s shop. He sees a body covered in ice and shudders at the sight, but the undertaker’s office merely serves for Fred as a place to steal tools. His proximity to death, however, suggests that the underground is a tunnel between the land of the living and the land of the dead, with the sewer water connoting both the Nile of the Old Testament as well as the River Styx from Greek Mythology. The Nile saves Moses from drowning, while the River Styx transports the dead to the afterlife. In the sewer, the baby can’t be saved, as is evidenced by Fred’s later dream about the dead baby, inverting the image of Moses in the basket from the Bible. Instead, the waters of the sewer simply lead to death. Fred escapes death early in the story by running from the cops and getting out of the torrent of the sewer water, but this escape from death is only temporary as he ends up carried into “the heart of the earth” (84) at the story’s end anyway.
In the sewer, Fred learns to invert life and death. He comes to see the people aboveground as being the walking dead, the aboveground itself “a wild forest filled with death” (54). The people who go about their lives were “sleeping in their living, awake in their dying” (30). Underground, Fred experiences life, but it’s a life of constantly wishing death. His final encounter with death (other than his own) is Thompson’s suicide. After witnessing it, he stares “for what seemed to him a thousand years” (65) before deciding he needs to return to the aboveground and tell others what he’s seen. This causes him “a cold dread” (65), but he pushes forward, perhaps certain he’s going to meet his literal death. Right away, white people shout at him for blocking traffic, one calling him the n-word and another even telling him to “stay there and get killed” (66). As a Black man, his only option in the white world is to be killed either slowly by living in that reality or quickly at the hands of a white person. As if to make that point abundantly clear, Lawson guesses that what he sees as Fred’s madness stems from the fact that “he lives in a White man’s world” (81). Lawson knows this but kills him anyway, as death is the only fitting end for Fred’s tragedy.
The Anagnorisis of Life Lived Underground
An anagnorisis is the moment in a text when characters become aware of their own circumstances or reality. For Fred, the experience of being underground is one prolonged anagnorisis. During his isolation there, he learns a spiritual truth that makes him feel “lured by the darkness and silence” (23) of the sewer. In the underground, he sees his own life reflected in distorted images. The dead baby, for instance, represents the reality that he as a Black man was born into, a reality in which one is dead from birth. Later, Fred sees a boy falsely accused of a crime that Fred committed, and he watches as the security guard receives the same treatment by the same police officers who mistreated him. He even sees a corpse as if to complete his life’s full journey. That lifecycle consists of only struggle and death because of racism and the nature of the aboveground world. Fred comes to see people living aboveground as “sleeping in their living” and “awake in their dying” (30). This reality becomes clear to him after experiencing the distorted reality of being underground. When he goes to the movie theater, he has a moment of clarity. He notes the people “were shouting and yelling at the animated shadows of themselves” (30) and imagines that he’s “hovering in the air just above them” (30) for he now recognizes that the cinema offers merely one escape from the cruel realities of the world.
Religion is another escape, one that Fred no longer understands now that he has experienced anagnorisis. He sees churchgoers begging for forgiveness and “something they could never get” (25) and feels a sudden “vague conviction” that these people should “stand unrepentant.” Later, he runs inside the same church and tries to tell the people what he learned, but he can’t articulate the words and is thrown out of the church while exclaiming that he “wants to tell them” (67). Just as he cannot type his truth, he cannot explain “then sprawling images that floated in him” (79) and “make them have the meaning for others that they had for him” (79). This inability to explain is a play on Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.” The simple version of that allegory is to imagine that people have lived in a cave their whole lives and see only shadows projected onto a cave wall. If one person left the cave, he’d see the fire that helps project the image and realize that life outside the cave is superior. However, upon returning to the cave, he’d be unaccustomed to the darkness of the cave and unable to see. The cave dwellers would conclude that life in the cave is superior because the world outside the cave has rendered the man who left blind. They’d then kill anyone who attempted to remove them from the cave due to the danger posed outside. Fred is like the man who leaves the cave of society. Upon returning to society, he can’t articulate the reality and is assumed to be dangerous and insane. Thus, society's “cave dwellers” kill him to protect the reality they’ve constructed. That Fred lives briefly in a cave in which all the things that have power in the aboveground—guns, money, machines—have no power completes the allegory by inverting it. For Fred, the reality he seeks, the clarity of the world, is available only in the cave, not in the bigger world in which he lived before the beginning of the story. Underground, he lives, as the title suggests, but aboveground he only dies.
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