Marcia Anglarill 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.

Marcia Anglarill From an NPR' interview with the author: WHITEHEAD: Actually, I was pretty reluctant to immerse myself into that history. It took 16 years for me to fi…moreFrom an NPR' interview with the author: WHITEHEAD: Actually, I was pretty reluctant to immerse myself into that history. It took 16 years for me to finish the book. I first had the idea in the year 2000, and I was finishing up a long book called "John Henry Days," which had a lot of research. And I was just sort of, you know, getting up from a nap or something (laughter) and thought, you know, what if the Underground Railroad was an actual railroad? You know, I think when you're a kid and you first hear about it in school or whatever, you imagine a literal subway beneath the earth. And then you find out that it's not a literal subway, and you get a bit upset. And so the book took off from that childhood notion. And that's a premise, not that much of a story. So I kept thinking about it. And I thought, well, what if every state our hero went through - as he or she ran North - was a different state of American possibility? So Georgia has one sort of take on America and North Carolina - sort of like "Gulliver's Travels." The book is rebooting every time the person goes to a different state.

As others have commented, it's a metaphor, it's magical realism, it's fiction. For me it worked. In fact, in some ways, it made it easier to handle the sheer brutality of the actual reality. But without taking away from the history and the ugly truths there. I understand how some readers would take issue with it. But really, it's no different from going to the movies, even ones based on a true story with questionable interpretations. If you can't practice suspension of disbelief, you're just not going to enjoy it.(less)

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Tim Moran I agree, at first it was jarring, the 'railroad', but if the author had tried to explain the actual movement of real people through a real place [thin ...more
Feb 06, 2021 10:53AM · flag

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The Underground Railroad

by Colson Whitehead (Goodreads Author)

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