Melody answers “Does anyone like that the author wrote the...”

Barbara asked this question about The Underground Railroad:

Does anyone like that the author wrote the railroad as a physical, operating one? I felt it unnecessary and beyond the scope of possibility.

Melody I just finished the book yesterday and have been thinking and mulling it over. My thoughts are still very fresh and still forming so bear with me--
In …moreI just finished the book yesterday and have been thinking and mulling it over. My thoughts are still very fresh and still forming so bear with me--
In terms of the magical and "unrealistic" aspects of the novel I felt the author was really pushing and playing with the genre of historic fiction, inviting us into difficult reflections that have as much to do with the present as the past. Where do YOU fall in this story? If you are white, would you have risked your life to fight slavery? Would you have been a Sam or a Martin or a Lumbly? And then if you ask yourself that question you have to ask yourself: and what am I today? Ultimately, it seemed to me that the question of the railroad and the escape to freedom was asking if our country will ever be free from the legacy of slavery and the racism that made it possible in the first place. Cora runs and runs, encountering simply new forms of bondage. The physicality of the railroad and other lyrical/magical aspects of the narrative push us out of a passive consumption of the novel as something that happened "in the past" that can be left there. The railroad in this narrative is itself alive-- shifting shapes and forms-- it is a penetration into a heart of darkness that questions the soul of this country. (less)

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