The Underground Railroad: Allusions 2 key examples

The nod to Gulliver’s Travels—a famous 1726 satiric work by Jonathan Swift—foregrounds the narrative parallels to Cora and Caesar’s escape. The 18th-century tale earns a name for its journeys: the titular protagonist gets caught in a shipwreck, where he washes ashore on the land of the small people, or Lilliputians. The more Gulliver travels, the further he roams. Subsequent legs of the journey take him to distant lands featuring giants, talking horses, and castles in the sky. The plotline bears relevance to the two runaways' journey through marshland, forest, and towns with wildly different customs.

From The Underground Railroad's perspective, the satiric work has as much to offer about the white psyche. Gulliver strays from one island to the next because he “kept forgetting what he had.” The drifting trials of this white protagonist, Caesar decides, aren’t so much caused by vulnerability as myopia. The white man builds and destroys, creates schoolhouses and then forgets about them. Through the work, Caesar identifies a failure to self-reflect.

Apart from its humor, Gulliver’s Travels is laden with political jabs. England’s second attempt at Irish conquest began in the 16th century, and the following centuries would see hundreds of thousands of massacred Irish civilians and waves of English colonists dispatched to displace the native population. As an Anglo-Irish writer, Swift was a supporter of Irish independence who criticized England’s bloody colonial project. He turned to pamphleteering towards the later half of his career, drafting “Drapier’s Letters” and “A Modest Proposal” to satirize the senseless treatment of Irish peoples under British takeover. Irish oppression and chattel slavery can’t be compared side by side, but Gulliver’s Travels offers Caesar the slight comfort of an author who is also experiencing and responding to an oppression of his time.

Each of the three mentioned figures stand as icons of Black excellence. Phillis Wheatley was the first Black author of a published book of poetry and among the best known pre-19th-century American poets. Though sold into slavery, Wheatley earned acclaim across England and eventually won her freedom. Jupiter Hammon was meanwhile the country’s first published Black poet, drawing upon his religious beliefs to criticize slavery. Despite an absence of formal education, Benjamin Banneker became a widely regarded mathematician and astronomer who earned the job of surveying land for Washington, D.C.

This is one of the few instances in which The Underground Railroad makes a deliberate allusion to historical figures. With the possible exceptions of Nat Turner and Eli Whitney, the novel rarely if ever mentions actual names. These early 19th-century figures ground the otherwise fictional narrative in a definite time and place.

More significantly, the allusions in this passage challenge the traditional understanding of history. Wheatley, Hammon, and Banneker are almost perfect opposites to Cora, who never gets written down into any almanac. Cora exists more as a fictional idea than a person, one of the untold millions whose stories have slipped through the cracks. While Wheatley’s poems live on, Cora’s trials—if not for this novel—will not. The novel suggests that histories, however accurate, are always guilty of erasure and removal. Who and what gets chosen for historical memory? How do we preserve the past? Through these allusions, the novel shows how history is a process of selective remembering that often forgets more than it preserves.