The Man Who Lived Underground

“A vague conviction made him feel that those people should stand unrepentant and yield no quarter in singing and praying, yet he had run away from the police, had pleaded with them to believe in his innocence. He shook his head bewildered.”

When Fred watches a church service from a crack in the underground, he feels like he’s watching something he’s not supposed to see. Moreover, he feels that the churchgoers are wrong to ask forgiveness of a god who will never grant them escape from the world’s realities. He recognizes that he too was like them before his time in the sewer awakened his brain to the way the world really functions.

“Yes, these people were children, sleeping in their living, awake in their dying.”

At the movie theater, Fred watches as people are entertained by images they see on the screen of people exactly like themselves. These people are looking for an escape from reality, but Fred sees them participating only in the death of the aboveground reality. This is one of the first instances in the story in which Fred conflates living and dying as being the same in the aboveground; additionally, the movie images connect to Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave,” in which people chained to a cave become transfixed by images on the cave wall.

“Emotionally he hovered between the world aboveground and the world underground. He longed to go out, but sober judgment urged him to remain here.”

After spending an indeterminate time underground, Fred comes across a butcher shop, where he eats as much fruit as he can. There, for the first time, he’s offered a clear exit back into the aboveground, but he’s psychically stuck in the liminal space of the underground, his body arrested between worlds just as his mind has been. He does go out briefly but retreats after seeing a headline about the hunt for him.

“It was not the money that was luring him, but the mere fact that he could get it with impunity.”

Underground, Fred briefly finds a purpose as he becomes obsessed with stealing money from a safe he can see from the cracks in the wall. He realizes that the money holds no intrinsic value for him, as money has no power in his world (he even uses it to decorate his cave) but recognizes for the first time that his ability to navigate between the two worlds gives him power. Ironically, someone else steals some of the money first, but it doesn’t matter to Fred, as he gets to take some for himself.

“They were the serious toys of the men who lived in the dead world of sunshine and rain he had left, the world that had condemned him, branded him guilty.”

After stealing a typewriter, Fred tries to type his name and then a story but starts to lose his memory of who he is. He realizes that the typewriter, like his stolen radio and cash, has no power underground since he can’t write and no one is there to read his story. Like the other items, the typewriter is a relic of the aboveground world, which he has begun to associate with death, although the story also implies that Fred might be able to gain some power from writing were he to articulate his thoughts.

“And that was how the world aboveground now seemed to him, a wild forest filled with death.”

After decorating his cave with the money that he took from the safe, Fred justifies his crime by saying that he simply took the cash the way a man in the wilderness would pick up firewood in the forest. While it’s ironic that Fred becomes a criminal underground, his justification of the crime conveys his increased separation from the aboveground. As with other points in the text, here Fred makes it clear that the world above him is one of death and that he’s no longer part of it.

“Why was this sense of guilt so seemingly innate, so easy to come by, to think, to feel, so verily physical?”

Throughout the story, the narration reveals that Fred has felt a sense of guilt his entire life. Here, while watching the church service for the second time, Fred thinks that the churchgoers are wrong to beg for salvation they can’t find, but he also wonders why he feels the need to repent and why he feels psychic shock from the past. The story implies that being a Black man in America means constantly feeling guilty for just being born; the psychic weight Fred feels is inherited from generations of oppressed Black people.

“Perhaps it was a good thing that they were beating the boy; perhaps the beating would bring to the boy’s attention, for the first time in his life, the secret of his existence, the guilt that he could never get rid of.”

As Fred watches a boy get beaten for stealing a radio that Fred himself stole, he hopes that the beating serves as an awakening for the boy. Fred doesn’t feel at all responsible for the beating the boy takes, as he has totally disconnected from the aboveground world and the guilt he has felt his whole life. Rather, Fred hopes only that the boy might understand the aboveground—in the way that Fred has learned to understand it during his time underground—but earlier in his life, suggesting that Fred thinks the boy might be able to escape the same fate as Fred.

“‘Our hunch was right,’ the kneeling policeman said. ‘He was guilty, all right.’”

Fred watches as Thompson, the security guard at the jewelry store, kills himself after being falsely accused of the crime that Fred himself committed. The same police officers that forced a false confession from Fred use Thompson’s suicide as confirmation of Thompson’s guilt in the crime they were forcing him to confess to without any evidence. In addition to confirming that Fred’s version of what happened in the police station is accurate, this scene sets in motion the story’s tragic ending, as Fred’s later admission that he witnessed Thompson’s interrogation and suicide leads the police officers to feel that they must kill Fred.

“He did not know how much fear he felt, for fear claimed him completely, but a cold dread at the thought of the actions he knew he would perform if he went out into that cruel sunshine. HIs mind said no; his body said yes; and his mind could not understand his feelings.”

Once he decides he must go aboveground, Fred is overwhelmed with a sense of dread at what he needs to do. This dread is one symptom of the guilt he feels his whole life as well as a newfound feeling brought on by his anagnorisis from living—actual living—underground. This quotation captures the liminality of Fred’s mind as he navigates between two worlds. It also foreshadows his tragic end, an end brought on by his journey “into that cruel sunshine.”

“Yes, he was going in and tell them. What? He did not know; but, once face to face with them, he would think of what to say.”

When he re-enters the aboveground, Fred finds the church he saw underground. He wants to tell the churchgoers the truths he discovered underground, but he can’t articulate his overwhelming thoughts and is thrown out of the church before he can say anything. This quotation captures that inability to explain what Fred has only come to understand by living underground.

“He felt that he could not explain himself to them. He tried to muster all the sprawling images that floated in him; the images stood out sharply in his mind, but he could not make them have the meaning for others that they had for him. He felt so helpless that he began to cry.”

At the police station, Fred tries to tell the officers about everything he saw underground, but he can’t figure out how to convey the broken images so that they make sense to someone who hasn’t experienced them. As with his attempts to write earlier in the story and his attempts to tell the churchgoers what he’s learned, Fred is inarticulate and unable to find a voice. This quotation reflects that and, once again, implies that salvation isn’t possible for Fred or for Black people in America since no one wants to hear their stories even if they can muster them.

“‘Maybe it’s because he lives in a white man’s world,’ Lawson said.”

The police officers to whom Fred confesses assume that he’s crazy. One suggests that Fred might have delusions of grandeur, but Lawson explains his plight in blunt racial terms. Aboveground, Fred is being driven mad because of racism and the guilt he fears for just being born; underground, Fred is free but loses his mind more clearly.