The Man Who Lived Underground

by Richard Wright

As I wrote page after page I was reminded of many psychiatric case histories of schizophrenic personalities. More and more, as the story progressed, I felt the writing to be a good emotional description of schizophrenia. The symptoms were unrolling as I wrote; I was not trying in any way to describe schizophrenia; it seemed that the very nature of Fred Daniels’s situation made such descriptions flow from the materials. First, I noticed that Fred Daniels was withdrawn from the world; second, that he suffered a loss of contact with reality in a hard and sharp sense; third, that there was a gradual disintegration of his personality. Yet, while noticing this, I also noticed that this whole idea of a man withdrawing from the world had a striking similarity to the life of my grandmother, who, in her religious life, was certainly withdrawn from the world as much as anybody has ever been withdrawn from it, as much as anyone can live in this world and not have anything to do with it.