The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead

I enjoy books about the days of slavery.  The heart-wrenching stories of slaves under the whip are difficult to read, but make great fiction.  Colson Whitehead adds to this genre with his Pulitzer-prize-winning 2016 novel The Underground Railroad.  He tells the story of Cora, a young slave who escapes from a plantation, enjoys a breath of freedom and is captured again, but ends up at a farm colony of free and escaped slaves.

I kept getting a sense that this story has been told before.  No question that it has.  My memory and the breadth of my reading is limited, but I couldn't help but see the borrowing from Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, where Jacobs spent years hiding in an attic.  I have a feeling there is a lot more borrowing from slaves' accounts of their own experience.  Tribute?  Cribbing?  Fictionalizing history?  This is what writers of fiction do, of course, I was just surprised at the similarities.

Whitehead's book has a feature that sets it apart from other slave accounts and slavery fiction.  In The Underground Railroad, the Underground Railroad is an actual railroad that runs underground.  On rails.  In tunnels.  I didn't feel like this twist added to the story itself.  Other than the fact that Cora got on a train to go from place to place, rather than secretly traveling in a more conventional manner, the story was no different.  The underground trains added nothing.

I expected Whitehead to add something new and insightful to the body of work of slave fiction.  He did: the Underground Railroad is an actual train!  But that's it.  No point, no purpose, just novelty for the sake of novelty.  Without that, The Underground Railroad is a decent if unoriginal novel about the evils and tragedies of slavery in the American south.  The superfluous addition of the train diminishes the book.


Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the complimentary electronic review copy!