The Man Who Lived Underground (Style)

Style

Images and Imagery

Through the many episodes of “The Man Who Lived Underground,” Wright weaves imagery of light and darkness, repeating, reinforcing, and inverting the imagery to heighten the sense that the world is chaotic and ultimately unknowable. For the most part, the underground is the world of darkness, and the world above ground is the world of light. The faint light that there is underground is strangely colored, from the “lances of hazy violet” coming through the holes in the manhole cover, to the light from the man’s matches, “glowing greenishly, turning red, orange, then yellow,” to the “red darkness” of the furnace room, and to the “yellow stems” from another manhole that reveal the floating baby. These odd colors heighten the nightmarish quality of life underground, but also highlight the fact that in this place the man is learning a new way to see.

After just a short time underground, the man loses his ability to live in normal white light. From his dark refuge he can see clearly those people who are still above ground: the people singing in the church, the dead man on the embalming table, the workers in the jewelry shop. In many senses, he can see them more clearly than they can see themselves, and they — although they are standing in the light — cannot see him at all. But when he turns on an electric light in the mortician’s basement a “blinding glare” renders him “sightless, defenseless.” By the end of the story, when he comes back out of the manhole, light and darkness have been inverted. He cannot see well (one harasser calls him “blind”), and the lights of approaching cars cast him into “a deeper darkness than he had ever known in the underground.” As he realizes that the police officers will not listen to his revelation, the light of his new knowledge is extinguished: “the sun of the underground was fleeting, and the terrible darkness of the day stood before him.”

Setting

The setting of the story, the sewer where Fred Daniels hides from the police, is also an overarching symbol of the darkness and slime in the depths of the human heart. Just as the stinking, filthy sewer lies just beneath the surface of the vibrant city streets, so do evil and rot lie just beneath the surface of society, and of individual people. Unless humankind can transform itself and climb out of the sewer, it will be doomed to everlasting fear, isolation, and blindness. Although he is not himself “cleansed,” Fred Daniels nearly succeeds in escaping the sewer, but the world is not yet ready for him or his message of universal guilt.

Naturalism

Wright’s earliest autobiographical writings show that he was fascinated with the great novels of naturalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially the work of Theodore Dreiser. The foundation of naturalism is the belief that people are a part of the natural world, just as animals are. They are acted upon by forces in their environment which they cannot understand or control. Actions that appear to be acts of will are really reactions to external forces.

Fred Daniels is, as the saying goes, a victim of circumstance. He is accused of murder because of situations entirely out of his control: he is a man of the wrong color in the wrong place at the wrong time. Like many naturalistic protagonists, he is like an animal, living underground and compared by the narrator to a rat or a dog. Daniels is repeatedly driven to act by forces he cannot understand or control. Resting in his cave, he feels an “irrational compulsion to act.” As he climbs out of the manhole at the end of the story, the narrator observes, “His mind said no; his body said yes; and his mind could not understand his feelings.” Against his own will, he finds the policemen, who have more control over him than he does himself. They, too, are forced by circumstance; they have “got to shoot his kind.” When Daniels meets the cruel death that is the fate of most naturalistic protagonists, he is not even a man any longer, but “a whirling object rushing alone in the darkness, veering, tossing, lost in the heart of the earth.”