The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

As an English major I’ve read my fair share of slave-narratives. Equiano (x 1,000,000), Fredrick Douglass, etc., etc. And while their value as teaching tools (not just as examples of writing from their time periods, but also as historical teaching tools) cannot be undervalued, in a day and age when organizations such as Black Lives Matter are alive and well, writing a slave-narrative takes a special kind of skill. Not because it would be difficult to convey the horrors of the slave but because the disconnect of several decades makes it difficult to write these stories with the appropriate sense of realism and passion.

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead is objectively a fine piece of fiction writing. The problem is, it’s just fine. The story itself is put together nicely: by the end of the story you truly care about what happens to the characters and wish only for their happiness. The problem comes when, by the end of the story, you’ve figured out the very obvious pattern taking place. To wit: something bad happens, the characters escape, they experience a time of happiness and then something bad happens again. This pattern takes place over and over and over again all the way through the book. There is no resolution at the end, or really, at any point in the book at all. There are several characters who simply disappear, never to be heard from again. The assumption being that they’ve died but without true confirmation of their fate.

Overall, the book is a well written piece of fiction. The imagery and syntax are understandable but complex enough to convey the horrors experienced by slaves. The characters are developed and sympathetic and by the end you just want them to be happy. But by the end of the book you also just want them to be done. To stay in one place and find some resolution. Yes, there should be an understanding that many slaves did not get resolution. That many of them spent their whole lives on the run. But this is a piece of fiction 100 years removed from the time of the slave-narrative. This is a piece of fiction. The lack of resolution at the end makes it difficult to appreciate the trials that the characters experienced throughout the story.

Rating: 3.5/5