The Man Who Lived Underground

Throughout “The Man Who Lived Underground,” Fred is near religion but rejects it or is rejected from it. The first connection to the aboveground that Fred encounters underground is a church. He hears the singing of a hymn and is excited to try to see it. But what he sees seems “abysmally obscene to him” (24). He begins to feel pain at the sight of Black people “groveling and begging for something they could never get” (25) and starts to hope they’d stand “unrepentant” due to the lot they’ve been given in the world. For Fred, religion has no point given that he has begun to experience something truer than he felt aboveground. The images he sees underground seem to link together in “some magical relationship” (51) that he can’t articulate. Like the money he steals—money that means nothing underground yet fascinates him due to its power aboveground—religion seems pointless to him underground. Later, aboveground, he enters the church and wants to tell the churchgoers something: “What? He did not know; but, once face to face with them, he would think of what to say” (67). Before he can even try to say his truth, he’s thrown out of the church due to his stench and appearance. The religious literally reject him even after he seems determined to reject it.

Beyond the church, the story has other religious symbols. The dead baby Fred encounters connects with the story of Moses in the Bible. He was placed in a basket on the Nile rather than drowned as was law. He grew up to lead the Jews away from Egypt. However, the baby in the water in the sewer is just dead. Fred sees only death underground: He literally sees an adult corpse at the undertaker’s too, as well as a suicide caused by the police. He feels that to have faith in a world of darkness, a world so much more closely aligned with Hell than Heaven, is pointless. However, the world of the aboveground, the world that is supposed to be Heaven, is a similar Hell for a Black man. After all, up there, he was forced to confess to a crime he didn’t even commit. And that confession is another connection to religion. Throughout the story, Fred feels the need to repent for some sin and beg for forgiveness. The police aboveground force him to sign a false statement repenting for something he didn’t do, yet he’s punished by the same police for repenting for a crime he did commit—robbing the jewelry store. The police’s sin is far greater, as they cause a man to commit suicide by falsely accusing him. However, their reward is to continue ruling over the surface world while literally condemning Fred to his death, where he’s finally baptized by the waters of the sewer before he’s swallowed up by Hell, “the heart of the earth” (84).