144 pages • 4 hours read
Colson WhiteheadThe Underground Railroad
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
The Underground Railroad
The Underground Railroad as a literal locomotive system is the primary speculative element of this work of alternative history. It is repeatedly referred to as the handiwork of Black people alone. Through this motif, Whitehead celebrates the strength and ingenuity of Black Americans, and also demonstrates the repeating refrain that Black people are the only ones who can truly save themselves and each other. While white Railroad operatives undoubtedly play crucial and compassionate roles throughout the narrative, it is repeatedly maintained that Black people, and Black people alone, built the actual railroad. Whitehead therefore asserts that, despite the horrors and brutalities of enslavement, Black people in America possess an indomitable strength, spirit, and will toward freedom.
Through the Underground Railroad’s existence as an actual rail line, Whitehead also indicts the concept of progress. The locomotive is one of the most recognizable symbols of American progress and is often seen as a beautiful symbol of the Industrial Revolution. By placing a train deep underground and casting its passengers as only able to see darkness, Whitehead turns the myth of American progress on its head. He foregrounds the fact that all the “progress” that America essentially attributes to white people was only earned through the pain and death of Black people, who must labor in literal darkness to secure their own freedom—which they must pursue in utter secret.
The American Imperative
Ridgeway repeatedly refers to the American imperative throughout the narrative. He is blunt and honest about his definition of the imperative: White Americans must take what supposedly belongs to them (Indigenous land, Black bodies and their labor) through force and violence, to secure their place as the lords and dominators of the new nation. So loyal and obsessed is he with this idea that an almost incoherent rambling about the imperative, which Homer dutifully records in his notebook, are the last words that we hear from the man. Through this motif, Whitehead lays bare and indicts the genocidal violence that lies at the heart of the American identity. A far cry from narratives about bootstraps, merit, and hard work, Whitehead envisions the American imperative as the imperative of injustice, theft, genocide, and violence.
The Underground Railroad is deeply invested in subverting popular depictions of both slavery and America. Through Whitehead’s unflinching parsing of the labyrinthine physical and psychic violence of slavery, he asserts that the brutality that white America inflicted upon Black people (and, to a lesser extent, the violence it inflicted against Indigenous peoples) was the true impetus of the economic growth and burgeoning of the nation. Without first stealing the land from its original inhabitants, white invaders would not have the territory to erect the plantations upon which they enslaved African people. And without that enslaved labor, they would not have had the riches and prosperity that they enjoyed. The true American imperative, then, laid in the securing of white future through the subjugation and exploitation of Indigenous and black people.
Elijah Lander
Elijah Lander is a stand-in for more than one historical Black figure. He is a figure not unlike both Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr. His powerful speeches and great academic gifts liken him to both Douglass and King, while his brutal assassination at a public gathering directly parallels the death of King. While Frederick Douglass existed during a time closer to the one that The Underground Railroad depicts, Martin Luther King, Jr. did not live until a different era in American history. However, the character of Lander strongly invokes both real historical figures. Through the character’s undeniable and purposeful symbolic link to these two real men, Whitehead asserts that Black history in America does not proceed in a neat straight line. Instead, Black people have found themselves entangled and cut down by white violence during every distinct era of the nation’s history. But the character of Lander is not only meant to invoke a sense of tragedy. His genius and words about black unity and compassion are also meant to symbolize another enduring aspect of Black life in America: resilience and hope.
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