Literary Analysis and Book Reviews New York Times Book Review. I know it is true, for she is now living in Canada.”. Web. The Question and Answer section for The Underground Railroad is a great In... Who is the narrator of The Underground Railroad? An objective narrator describes the central character of each chapter in the third person, telling their thoughts in a detached voice. Implicitly or explicitly, these works exposed at least one of two interrelated lies that kept America’s peculiar institution humming: that slavery was infinitely more benign than abolitionists claimed, and that black individuals lacked the intellectual capacity to write books or to think for themselves, as Thomas Jefferson claimed in Notes on the State of Virginia. Another way to prevent getting this page in the future is to use Privacy Pass. Find the star and follow it, run like runners have done, all the way back to the days of Old Slavery.”. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property. As Cora, Jasper, Ridgeway, Boseman, and Homer make their way through Tennessee on their circuitous journey to deliver Cora back to the Randall plantation, they encounter a desolate and destroyed landscape; a huge wildfire has recently spread through the state. They are both pursued by Ridgeway, and both eventually escape his clutches. The great paradox of the novel is the paradox of America itself, a nation that promises freedom and yet enslaves millions. Even a white author like Harriet Beecher Stowe, who in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) famously inveighed against slavery and the Fugitive Slave Act (which essentially made every free black person a presumed fugitive and conscripted every United States citizen as a slave catcher in the 1850s), endured blistering attacks on her credibility from slavery’s defenders. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. Explore Course Hero's library of literature materials, including documents and Q&A pairs. . Cora and Ridgeway face off in one of the stations of the Underground Railroad. Just some brave sad souls darting across open fields and wading in shallow streams and moving from tree line to tree line. So it is with pre-Civil War accounts, slave testimony recorded in the 1930s and the recent flurry of novels and TV series exploring the horrors encountered by those who tried to escape. The Underground Railroad. Course Hero. The Underground Railroad essays are academic essays for citation. 24 June 2019. "The Underground Railroad Literary Elements". Cora rotates between scenes where she plays an African boy employed as a deckhand on a slave ship and a plantation slave tasked with thread-spinning and feeding chickens with imaginary seed. Ajarry is raped by slave traders aboard the ship that takes her to America, foreshadowing the rape of Mabel by fellow slave Moses and of Cora by fellow slaves Edward and Pot. There was only darkness outside the windows on her journeys, and only ever would be darkness.” © 2020 Paste Media Group. Copyright © 2016. Few narratives of the abolitionist era captured life in the slave-labor camps (imbued with false gentility as “plantations”) in the cotton kingdom of the Deep South, because so few fugitives from this region ever made it to freedom. In Whitehead’s book, the Underground Railroad is quite literally a subway, albeit a desolate and frightfully unpredictable one. Discovered by slave catchers in a house on the outskirts of the city, Margaret cut the throat of her two-year-old daughter to keep her from being returned to bondage and nearly killed her 10-month-old daughter before deputies snatched away her weapon. Victor hastens to explain to the reader that the agent is “talking about that novel, about the Alabama runner who is discovered hiding in a small Tennessee town, and the courageous white lawyer who saves him from a vicious racist Deputy Marshal who comes to claim him… The hero of the book, the hero and the heart, is that good man lawyer: the white man is the saver, the black man gets saved.” In addition to his twist on Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Winters might also be describing every historical tale about the Underground Railroad in the first 100 years after the Civil War, with the notable exception of the tireless black abolitionist, conductor, testimony-taker and historian William Still. At one point, an Underground Airlines agent laments the “Mockingbird mentality” of many blacks who expect white folks to save them. Cesar, another slave running for freedom who learned … The Underground Railroad study guide contains a biography of Colson Whitehead, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis. The ice inspires moments of unmitigated joy that are the diametric opposite of Eliza’s abject terror, as if insisting that moments such as these should have awaited every fugitive on the other side of the icy river, though they rarely did. Uncle Tom’s Cabin reads somewhat problematically now, too forgiving to mid-Atlantic slave owners, saddled by dated descriptions of “woolly headed boys,” choosing as its hero the nobly accommodationist Uncle Tom. The narrator describes the renovations and small improvements the mother-daughter pair have made on the cabin in detail, showing the love and care behind it. The book’s narrator and central character, Victor, is a slave who’s been enlisted to pose as an agent of an anti-slavery network known as Underground Airlines. Even in a country with only four slave states out of 48, upholding slaveholders’ property rights essentially renders slavery the law of the land nationwide. Explore Course Hero's library of literature materials, including documents and Q&A pairs. The Freedom Trail is a grotesque path through the woods, lined with the tortured bodies of black people. The first two generations of black authors who attempted to publish these narratives also faced the burden of authentication. Another train ride delivers Cora to a free community in South Carolina, where blacks seem to live peacefully alongside whites. Steve Nathans-Kelly is a writer and editor based in Ithaca, New York. Essays for The Underground Railroad. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. Much of Underground Airlines’ fascination comes in the subtle alterations Winters has made in the intervening years since the Civil War that never happened. I think the slave catcher’s point of view is probably the default setting on American history.” In the modern-day United States, where the century’s most potent racial justice movement has emerged in response to the aggressive tactics of racial-profiling police, and a real estate mogul and reality TV star has made himself a national populist hero by goading the president of the United States into showing his papers, Whitehead’s point about the prevalence and persistence of the slave catcher’s point of view seems hard to dispute. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. The book takes multiple perspectives. By Steve Nathans-Kelly | September 23, 2016 | 4:12pm. Or is Gulliver’s Travels a better explanation? "The Underground Railroad Study Guide." The above question calls for your opinion, and response. Tubman herself, bashed in the head by an overseer with a two-pound weight as a young girl, “suffered headaches, seizures and ‘fits of somnolency’” throughout her life, “causing her to fall unconscious for minutes at a time, and pushing a mind already fertilized by evangelical religion into a feverish mysticism that awed those who came into contact with her,” Fergus Bordewich writes in Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America. The Underground Railroad is an example of a neo-slave narrative, a term coined by Ishmael Reed that refers to a work of literature written in the contemporary era that is set during the slavery era and tells the story from the perspective of enslaved characters. Why or Why Not? All Rights Reserved, The Ancestors of 21st-Century Railroad Narratives. Whitehead’s departure from a rigorous adherence to history gives him the latitude to explore and expose horrors that wouldn’t fit in a more linear book. . June 24, 2019. Escaped slave-turned-playwright William Wells Brown once claimed, “Slavery never can be represented.” Any attempt to capture the American enslavement experience—fact or fiction, of white or black authorship, apologist, abolitionist or revisionist—will inevitably fall short of representing the whole. Course Hero. Jacobs’ torture was watching her own children pass by through a tiny “loophole” in the attic wall; Cora’s window on the world reveals minstrel shows and public lynchings. resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel. Discover more information about the themes in this book. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad tells the story of Cora, a runaway slave who travels from state to state on railroad cars physically under the ground of the American South. Morrison’s Sethe, a free black woman living in Cincinnati several years after the Civil War, is modeled partly on Margaret Garner, a woman who escaped slavery in Kentucky in 1856 with her four children, her husband and his parents. Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, the much-acclaimed new novel from the author of such piercing works as The Intuitionist and John Henry Days, bears powerful echoes of both pre-Civil War slave narratives and slave testimony gathered for the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writers Project of the 1930s. By beginning Cora’s odyssey in Georgia, Whitehead immediately departs from the common historical locus of many Underground Railroad accounts. In a recent interview with NPR about his research for The Underground Railroad, Whitehead discussed his reliance on slave narratives and remarked, “I actually didn’t research the slave catcher’s point of view. Performance & security by Cloudflare, Please complete the security check to access. She was enslaved by the Randall family, who... eNotes.com will help you with any book or any question. Thus the idea of the network as an airline “is a figure of speech, the root of a grand extended metaphor… A plane is big and hard to hide, and defending the sovereign air space of the several states is an enumerated responsibility of the National Guard.”, Even more to the point, Winters offers this take on the most common, least reported means of escape: “The other thing to remember, of course, was that most people got no help at all… No planes and no cars, or truck, either. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is best understood as a book calculated to engage white readers at a point of national crisis in 1852 and win their allegiance to the abolitionist cause. The Question and Answer section for The Underground Railroad is a great It was referred to metaphorically as both “underground” and a “railroad” but... How does Colson Whitehead use literary devices such as point of view? Whitehead evokes Jacobs again when the railroad deposits Cora in North Carolina, where whites have “abolished niggers,” trading slavery for genocide. How was Cora's identity portrayed throughout the book? The Underground Railroad study guide contains a biography of Colson Whitehead, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis. The Underground Railroad takes its name from the efforts of abolitionists and other individuals with antislavery beliefs to aid runaway enslaved persons in escaping their so-called "masters." Tubman, a Dorchester County native herself, appears in two distinct characters: the spectral presence of “Moses,” a fearless “Gospel Train” conductor reputed to threaten runaways with death if they decide to turn back, and Liz, a “two-headed” escaped slave who experiences vivid dreams during narcoleptic collapses. Historical Fiction, Fantasy, Fugitive Slave Narrative.