Wright, Richard - Susan Neal Mayberry (essay date January 1989)
Susan Neal Mayberry (essay date January 1989)
SOURCE: Mayberry, Susan Neal. “Symbols in the Sewer: A Symbolic Renunciation of Symbols in Richard Wright's ‘The Man Who Lived Underground’.” South Atlantic Review 54, no. 1 (January 1989): 71-83.
[In the following essay, Mayberry explores the heavy symbolism of Wright's short story “The Man Who Lived Underground.”]
The fact that Richard Wright's “The Man Who Lived Underground” is somewhat paradoxically a long short story prepares its reader for its multiple ambiguities and explains the range of interpretations that have resulted from them. The short story has been variously described as a depiction of the social and ethical problems facing the American black (Gounard 381), a “perfect modern allegory” exposing the sewage of the human heart (Margolies), a rendering of Freudian guilt (Fabre, “Underground”; Margolies), a surrealistic search for identity (Bakish;...
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