The Man Who Lived Underground

“The Man Who Lived Underground” opens in medias res (in mid-narrative). Fred, whose name isn’t revealed for many pages, is on the run, and has “got to hide” (19). The narrative provides no time and little cues to adjust to Fred’s reality, giving the story a visceral closeness and a disorienting sense of immediacy. That is, it reveals nothing about who Fred is or what he may or may not have done but is immediately in his head, experiencing his fear and dread. Wright never lets up on this proximity and stress throughout the story, perhaps to convey the psychic terror of being a Black man in America firsthand. Fred’s reality is shocking. He wakes up with “the idea that he had been dreaming” (20) and had just been awakened while on the run. The story mimics Fred’s state of mind as between a dreamlike state and a cruel reality.

Fred repeatedly drifts between reality and dreams, but even when he’s awake, the world of the underground seems “strange and unreal” (21). The sights he takes in are often indistinguishable from dreams, as even routine images take on an eerie otherworldliness. For example, the dead baby is a “strangely familiar image” that both “attracted and repelled him” (26). Later, he dreams of walking on water to save a baby from a drowning lady. However, even in the dream, Fred is helpless, only able to temporarily save the baby before losing it in the water and beginning to “doubt that [Fred] could stand on the water” (34) as he begins to sink. While the baby image has biblical similarities to the story of Moses being released into the Nile, the image in the sewer is one of eeriness and terror, as it’s a place that can offer no salvation. In addition, the dead baby foreshadows Fred’s eventual death, as his body too gets carried away by the sewer current when he’s unable to find the salvation he seeks. The dreamscape recurs throughout the text too.

Adding to this dreamlike state is the fact that Wright doesn’t share Fred’s name until roughly halfway through the story. After Fred commits his first actual crime—robbing the jewelry store (forgivably stealing food and tools for survival), he sits down to type his name: “freddaniels.” Before this declaration of identity, the story refers to him only as “he” and “the man,” which contributes to its disorienting effect. The lack of name, though, also gives him a vague everyman status. His story could be that of any Black man in America. Indeed, the story makes it clear that he was framed for a murder simply because he was a Black man. Even when he’s seen emerging from underground, he’s just treated as another Black man—first at the butcher shop, where a white couple assume that he’s a subservient clerk, and later at the police department, where he’s treated as just another crazy person. It’s interesting, therefore, that he declares his identity only after he has committed a crime and seemingly becomes what society has already labeled him: a criminal. While Fred doesn’t see his actions as criminal, they are, of course, quite literally crimes. However, in that moment, he feels the need to declare his personhood. Shortly thereafter, though, this sense of personhood starts to dissipate. Back in his cave, he tries to type again, but wonders “but what was his name?” (53). His mind is blank. Instead, he gives way to a fantasy of being a rich man aboveground, only to become overwhelmed just as if he were aboveground. Again, he has a dream of sorts, envisioning himself looking “down upon land and sea as men fought, as cities were razed” (57). These are the nightmares of the real world and yet they are as clear to Fred underground as they are in the reality of the actual world.

For Fred, the underground is a liminal space, a space of transformation between two other worlds. In many stories, the liminal space connotes complete freedom, but in this story, Fred can never quite get free. The visions he experiences are nightmarish. Worse, he begins to get “afraid of himself, afraid of doing some nameless thing” (56). While this fear ultimately puts him on the path to undoing his bad deeds, he must witness more horrors before he finally returns to the aboveground world. Even before he witnesses Thompson’s suicide, though, he notes feelings of guilt and dread. He tries to go to church but is thrown out, too gross apparently to be offered spiritual salvation. With no place to repent, he’s left feeling like he’s merely “trying to remember a gigantic shock that had left a haunting impression” on his body, something that “had been forgotten by the conscious mind” and leaving him in a “state of eternal anxiety” (60). This is the guilt he has been told to feel simply for the sin of being born a Black man in a racist society, with the gigantic shock seemingly being the experience of the cruel racial past the Black body carries with it across generations. However, it’s also a sense of dread of what that same racist society can and will do to him.

Even after Fred witnesses the police doing the same thing to Thompson that they did to him, his only goal is to confess, for he knows only “a cold dread at the thought of the actions he knew would perform” (65) aboveground. That action is admitting sin and giving into the guilt he has been feeling for no reason throughout the story. This is a reversal for him. While underground, he feels a “vague conviction” that the churchgoers he witnesses “should stand unrepentant” (25), but aboveground, he can only admit guilt for crimes he didn’t commit. Aboveground, he’s even less free than he was underground, as he’s forever guilty for just being born. Worse, he has no way to articulate the truths he learned on his journey underground. For instance, while he tries to “think of what to say” (67) to the churchgoers, he can’t, nor is he given the chance to speak. He must return to the land whose truth he now understands without at least being able to explain what he now understands. This is no kind of life at all, only more death. It’s reminiscent of Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave,” in which a man learns the truth of how people in his society are being shackled and living a lie but becomes blinded upon returning to announce that truth to his fellow cave inhabitants. Fred is like that man, in that he can’t expose what he has learned during his time away from society but is unable to actually return to his society and live with the knowledge, even though he can’t articulate it. His time underground has distorted his world, and now he can’t see clearly in it.

As such, the story’s title and the significance make sense only at the end of the story. This isn’t a story about a man who lived underground as much as a story about a man who died aboveground. Underground, Fred experiences something closer to true freedom for the first time in his life, meaning that he only truly lived when he was underground and free (even though the psychic shock of what happened aboveground prevents true freedom). However, that freedom comes with a price. For one thing, the irony is that he wasn’t a criminal aboveground but becomes one underground, stealing money as well as various tools and food. Fred experiences real guilt for the death of the security guard, not merely the guilt he doesn’t understand for the death he confessed to before the story began. For another thing, he experiences a psychic cost, as he begins to lose his sense of self once he experiences true living. He couldn’t possibly return to the “wild forest filled with death” (54)—which is how he comes to see the aboveground—after his time in the cave, but he also can’t live in the sewer, as he no longer knows who he is. His foundation has been shaken to its core. The psychological toll of being himself, a Black man in 1940s America, is crushing even when he’s ostensibly free of society.