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Explanation and Analysis:
The Underground Railroad offers a textured account of 19th-century slavery through its engagement with figurative language, dialect, free indirect discourse, and time. It is a multi-perspective story that shifts constantly between Cora and the other characters along her journey. At times, Whitehead narrates the novel from Caesar's, Ethel's, and even Ridgeway’s viewpoints. This cast of characters layers the novel with different voices and enables it to grapple with the complex experience of slavery. At the same time, facsimiles of runaway postings before every leg of Cora’s journey create a reading experience in which history is both alive and present. The novel brings chattel slavery out from the realm of historical archives and into an active, unfolding conversation.
In frequent retreats through backstory, The Underground Railroad suggests the past can never quite be set aside. The novel’s first section draws extensively upon exposition—it recounts episodes about Ajarry’s heritage, the history of the Hob women, and even Blake’s dog—as Cora plans out her escape. Other sections introduce the reader to Ethel’s upbringing and Ridgeway’s childhood, using their psyches to survey the forces that shaped them. The novel traces past to present within its characters but also through the arc of America’s history itself, connecting slavery to countless other acts of racial violence. The novel’s investment in exploring the past sheds light upon the systemic, enduring qualities of injustice.
When it isn’t looking back, the novel trains its reader to focus on slavery’s raw and sensory experience. Simple, almost deadpan, prose delivers a brutal intensity. The work’s short sentences make for direct, often straightforward narration that puts moments of cruelty into sharp relief. In fondling enslaved women, Terrance Randall “tasted his plums, and broke the skin, and left his mark.” Bullets pierce Boseman’s body like a “black flower blooming” and, when the Valentines' farm falls to Ridgeway’s forces, “more rifles crackled.” The narration balances detachment with emotion, managing to hold its subject at a distance but still elicit horror from the reader.
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