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Foreshadowing
Genre
Explanation and Analysis:
The Underground Railroad is a work of historical fiction about the lived realities of nineteenth-century American slavery. Cora’s escape is part of a deservingly broader narrative that reckons with the outsized legacies of slavery. In tracing Cora’s journey, The Underground Railroad delivers a fictional account that matches its historical subject matter in breadth. The novel spans a considerable distance of time—weaving in Ajarry’s capture decades prior, for instance—but also features a spectrum of characters and interests. In doing so, the novel draws attention to all the parties involved in the slavery issue at the time, from members of the abolitionist network to slavecatchers and westward pioneers. Far from limiting itself to the plantation, chattel slavery constructs an entire social apparatus.
Given its genre and the relative absence of enslaved voices in the record, the novel takes liberties with certain details of the past. But the work also tests the limits of historical memory by stretching the bounds of realism. The novel fictitiously literalizes its namesake, casting the abolitionist network as an actual system of train rails. Suggestions of historical events from other time periods, such as the 20th-century eugenics movement or later mob-led lynchings, make their appearances along Cora’s pre-Civil War journey. In narrating her escape, Whitehead places the facts of slavery in conversation with more historically recent forms of discrimination and racism. Coupled with its use of figurative language, multiple perspectives, and violence, parts of the story can occasionally bend towards surrealism—as though to reinforce the unimaginable trauma and horrors of slavery.
Scholars have classified works of this kind as neo-slave narratives, modern engagements with slavery that focus on the way it informs the experience of Black identity today. Novels like The Underground Railroad revisit slavery to capture Black perspectives, and stories like Cora’s remind the reader of the gaps between historical facts.
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