Richard Wright's writing is at times exceptional, even if the story-line ultimately failed to adhere. While I have not read a biography, Wright's life was an amazing tale in itself, a largely self-educated man who grew to admire Mark Twain, Gertrude Stein and surrealism in art. Still, despite his tears, his nihilism wins out and he walks away. He thinks that there’s nothing he can do, although he could easily stop this. It would be the “right” thing to do, except that he’s been shown that there is no such thing as right and there isn’t a connection between doing what’s “right” and having the right result. He rubbed the money with his fingers, as though expecting it suddenly to reveal secret qualities. It’s just like any other kind of paper, he observed…. As he toyed with the money, there was in him no sense of possessiveness. 20 Finally, this devastatinginquiryinto oppression and delusion, this timelesstour de force, emerges in full,the work Wright was most passionate about, as he explains in the profoundly illuminating essay, ‘Memories of My Grandmother,’ also published here for the first time.This blazing literary meteor should land in every collection.”

Fred associates his confession with his underground epiphany. Moreover, he feels his underground life fading away as he sees the paper burn. For him, there was twisted freedom to being on the run, since gave him a reason to retreat underground, a place he associates with truth and clarity. In The Man Who Lived Underground, Fred is a man who has been forced to sign a false confession for murder, demoralized and treated in a way that leads him to understand that he no longer has a place in the world. As he flees into the underground, he wrestles with this new perspective and tries to reconcile it with things like his religious upbringing. In the meantime, he finds that through the sewer system, he can tunnel into the basements of local business and take what he likes. The realization that money no longer has any value to him culminates in Fred’s return to his cave, where he dips the bills in glue and pastes them to the walls. At last, Wright tells us, “He was free!” Defying capitalism, liberating himself from society, and escaping the reach of a racist state, Fred achieves what he sees as emancipation by realizing “the inexpressible value and importance of himself.” He resolves to live by his own rules from this point on, because he now values himself and his way of seeing the world. 23 He now knew the inexpressible value & importance of himself. He must assert himself, must devise a means of action to convince those who lived above-ground of the death-like quality of their lives. He felt these things through images & at some time in the near future, he would rise up from the underground, forsake this haven, walk forth & say something to everybody.Daniels does in fact emerge, reads that he is no longer in the news as a murder suspect, confronts the police who were responsible for his imprisonment, finding that they no longer have an interest in him, having assigned the murders to "an Italian man", who apparently was also among the "usual suspects."

Chapter-by-Chapter Summary

He did not feel that he was stealing, for the cleaver, the radio, and the money were on the same level of value, all meant the same thing to him. They were the toys of the men who lived in the dead world of sunshine and rain he had left, the world that had condemned him. 22 Then, when Murphy punches him (when he’s offered water), another officer comments that his timing has gotten very precise, indicating that the officers are having fun inflicting violence and that this is something that’s done frequently. Fred’s carelessness with things like guns and objects that are considered valuable show, with this new perspective, how he truly no longer has the same values as he once did. When the book opens, he is carefully counting the money he made that day. Now, he plasters dollars on the wall and diamonds across the floor.

Next, Fred finds himself digging into a basement coal bin. He climbs through into the basement of a building where he carefully walks until he reaches a sink. He enjoys the small comfort of washing his hands and takes a long sip of water. Above him, he hears voices. Driven by curiosity, Fred heads up the stairs and realizes he is in a movie theater. The power and pain of Wright’s writing are evident in this wrenching novel. . . . Wright makes the impact of racist policing palpable as the story builds to a gut-punch ending, and the inclusion of his essay ‘Memories of My Grandmother’ illuminates his inspiration for the book. This nightmarish tale of racist terror resonates.”— Publishers Weekly In Richard Wright’s version, the allegory is flipped. Whereas, the “real world” is Richard’s cave, and in the sunlight/surface world above, the people are “chained to the soothing and concocted images of Hollywood and a diluted religious orthodoxy which hides them from knowledge of their fugitive passions of greed and brutality” (McNallie). Though his job survived the early years of the Depression, his position was eliminated in 1931, and Wright went on relief. The next year, he began attending meetings of the local John Reed Club, a literary offshoot of the Communist Party. In time he became a party member and worked with the Federal Writers’ Project. In 1938, he published a short story collection, Uncle Tom’s Children, and two years later he published the novel for which he is best known: Native Son. It was in the midst of this period of early success, when Wright was a member of the Communist Party and still close to the days of his impoverished childhood, that he wrote The Man Who Lived Underground. 8

Synopsis

This is a summary for the novel The Man Who Lived Underground, which was published in 2021. (This is NOT a summary for the short story version of this which had previously been published.) Part One The memory of his religious convictions reminds him of his ties to the world. He feels a responsibility to save the other people by doing something to alert others to the truths he has learned. The book is written as a surreal riff on jazz, about a man who has been othered by society so much that he needs to plead guilty to a crime he is innocent of, "it impossible for his ideas and feelings to assume the form of words" (Wright 142).

This astonishing novel [is at last] available to readers, fulfilling a dream Wright wasn’t able to realize in his lifetime.”— OprahDaily.com After stealing a number of items, Fred tunnels into the basement of a real estate office that “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” From his hiding place, he watches someone enter the combination to a safe. When that person leaves, Fred opens the safe himself, thinking to steal the money in it. But something unusual happens: 19 The next stop—at a radio shop—provides him with a radio for his new abode. Daniels hooks it up in his cave, expecting to hear music that will soothe him as he pauses from his frenetic adventures. Instead, he hears a catalog of news events, all of which suggest the irrationality of a world of war and destruction and hatred. Daniels adds this information to his growing sense of himself and the world he has momentarily left, not behind him, but above him. For this man escapes and hides in the sewers, tunneling into basements. In a split second, he leaves Civilization and exists apart from it. Obviously an allegory for so many things this living underground and living an invisible life. No one knows he’s down there and no one suspects he’s hiding there. Fred is reminded of the emptiness of what awaits after death. His religious ideas about afterlife are provide a jarringly dissonant comparison to what he is looking at (“he knew that she had died expecting to reap a rich harvest of eternal happiness and there was for her now only this coldness and endless time”).Daniels walks into the story with the pride of a man happy to have worked for an honest week’s pay. Between beatings and racial epithets, Wright captures Daniels as he cycles through feelings of fear, rage, and confusion. None of his childlike, raw emotions allow him to articulate anything beyond barely coherent pleading. This moment initiates the disintegration of his humanity, which Wright wants to highlight. In fact, Daniels’s wife calling out to him amid her fear and pain is perhaps the final time that he is named outright. The police refer to him as “boy” or worse. The character’s most effective response to the police was to slink away from his overseers and retreat into the sewer, where the narrator simply refers to Daniels as “he.” Here he becomes invisible to all of society—essentially free. There is a strong existentialist and nihilistic bent to the character of Fred once he is underground and no longer within the grasp of society. The injustice he experiences forces him to question his morals, his values, his perception of what is valuable in the world and his religion. At the jewelry story, Fred is able to get a peek of Murphy with the night watchman. The missing stuff has been discovered, and Fred sees that Murphy is trying to beat a confession out of the night watchman he’d seen sleeping there when he took the stuff. In Memories of My Grandmother, an essay by Richard Wright (which was published alongside this book), he explains that The Man Who Lived Underground was inspired by his grandmother’s strong religious conviction.