The Glow of the Underworld
The world of the underground is a hazy one where colors are distorted through a fuzzy glow. The predictability of the sharpness and clarity of the colors associated with the world above brought under the suspicion. The EXIT sign of the theater glows red, the flame of a match glows weirdly green before turning red, and a basement furnace glows red. Even the coins that he steals are described as a “glowing mound of shimmering copper and silver.” The persistence of this imagery serves to intensify the effect of the darkness in the sewers on Fred’s perception which undergoes a transformation in which he rejects the former clarity of illusion and embraces the clarity of a world with much fuzzier boundaries than previously accepted.
Names
A pattern of imagery is woven through the subtle use of connotation of names. The underground man is eventually revealed to be named Fred Daniels; a name that creates no immediate prejudice toward ethnic or racial expectations. This sense of anonymity is further intensified by a last name that is also the plural form of an equally common first name. Combined with the title, these elements implicate Fred as an Everyman whose plight might be shared by nearly anyone. On the other hand, the name of the woman whom the police suspected Fred of killing—and beat a confession out of him for killing—is named Peabody. The connotations of that name for many readers over the decades would have been an immediate connection with one of the most prestigious media honors in America—the Peabody Award. In addition, the relative rarity of such a name create a sense of distinction and status further serves to divide the respective places in society held by murder victim and suspected murderer. This division in turn becomes one of those examples of clarity in the world above which is really illusion; the system works to bring to justice the killer of Peabody even it is means eventually murdering an innocent party.
Sanity and Insanity
A stark line is drawn between the perception of sanity and insanity relative to what takes place underground. When Fred goes to the police to tell them what he’s witnessed, he recite a litany of imagery that the reader is already familiar with: “I took a sackful of money and pasted it on the walls,” “I was down in the basement and I went into a movie,” “I took diamonds and watches and rings...just to play with,” “I stomped the diamonds into dirt,” and “I saw a dead baby and a dead man.” Even the reader who has already witnessed and can testify that each of these incidents actually occurred might well agree with Lawson’s assessment upon hearing them confessed all at once in this way: “You’re nuts.” This is another example of how imagery in the story is consistently exploited to heighten the significance of perceptual disassociation being at play in the world of darkness below.
Laughter
Although Wright has written a dark, relentlessly depressing story, a lot of laughter is described in “The Man who Lived Underground.” Notably, however, not all this laughter is equitable. For instance, the audience in the movie theater is described as “a stretch of human faces, tilted upward, chanting, whistling, screaming, laughing” in unified recognition of a proper emotional response to whatever is taking place on the screen. From Fred’s perspective, however, this very same laughter is something more sinister; it is an acknowledgement of complicity in being blind to the world around them. From Fred’s newly established point of view, the laughter is false and not in any way proper emotionally. In much the same way, Fred’s own laughter later on is viewed as a distinctly improper emotional response by the cops when rises out of the sewer to tell them what he’s seen. Only when the police aggressively responds to Fred’s existential laughter posed by the question of what he want does he stop. “What in the hell are you laughing about” is like a slap to the face reminding Fred that he is no longer in the world of hazy glow of truth, but back among the clarity of illusion in the world above.
