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I was standing in a gallery in the New York MOMA in April when I saw it. “Invisible Man?” I went straight across the room toward the huge photograph of a young black man, seated on a stool, hunched over a pad of paper, writing, as hundreds of electric li ght bulbs glared yellow from the walls and ceiling only an arm’s length from him. 

“It is!” I exclaimed to the three or four people glancing at it as they roamed past. “It’s the opening of Invisible Man!” They looked at me with the polite patience reserve d for elderly nuts. “The novel,” I insisted. “Ralph Ellison. Around 1950. You remember. Man hides underground to write archetypal black American experience. Everybody read it.” 

Not them. They looked blank, shrugged, and moved on to the next painting. 

Ba ck home, I decided to reread Invisible Man and two other short novels using a similar metaphor: The Man Who Lived Underground by Richard Wright, and Notes From the Underground by Dostoevsky. I wondered if I would see a hereditary line running through them, Dostoevsky to Wright to Ellison; if I’d learn more about the meaning and attraction of the “underground” as a metaphor. 

The connotation of the term “underground” (apart from its literal use, as in the London Underground train system) can be symbolicall y positive (down the rabbit hole with Alice). More often it is negative, or mixed. In Greek mythology, the underworld is the kingdom of all the dead, with eternal tortures for evil souls, but dancing in the Elysium Fields for the virtuous. In Christian my thology, the underground is negative, designed only for sinners—hellfire, but possible purgatory, redemption, and a rising up to Heaven, somewhere “up” there in the skies. 

In “noir” movies of the 1930s and 1940s, the “underworld” referred to the not-so-hidden evil but glamorous doings of urban criminals. As a political metaphor, underground can be a positive term for undermining the rule of the unjust: the underground railroad for escaping slaves; the underground press to expose news that is censored. 

“Going underground,” can mean a change of identity in order to avoid joining in government-ordered violence (the draft) or, more dubiously, can mean using violence to counter government violence (the splinter group of the 1960s, Weather Underground).  

Inv isible Man does not actually take place in the protagonist’s hidden hole. The closed-off, forgotten basement which he makes bright by tapping illegally into city power lines is only the temporary shelter where he writes his above-ground life story so far: a series of aborted disasters—college, a move from rural south to urban north, menial jobs, left-wing politics, demagogues, murderers, race riots. The central metaphor of the novel is not the underground; it is his “invisibility” as a man, as a human be ing in the reality behind the sham promises held out to him on all sides of American society. 

Richard Wright’s black protagonist, Fred Daniels, actually does live his story underground, in the city sewer system where he had fled from police who were tort uring him to force him to confess a crime he did not commit. The sewer tunnels are a rich and strange part of the city, surface and underground levels dependent on one other. Fred moves back and forth between levels, finding food and tools in forays above ground, finding rest, shelter, and a kind of free expression underground. He expresses his rejection of the lies of the world above with gestures like papering the walls of his little sleeping alcove with paper money, tamping down the damp earth floor an d studding it with diamonds (all taken from a safe in one of his above-ground forays). Fred lacks the formal education of Ellison’s unnamed protagonist, but he is also free of naïve belief in false promises and intellectual theories. Furthermore, Fred shows impressive skills and creativity in making his underground survival possible. 

Dostoevsky’s unnamed protagonist calls his shabby apartment “a dreadful, horrible hole,” but the underground from which he sends us his “notes” or self-analyses is a mental underground, a place of spite and the “disease of consciousness.” 

At 40, with a small inheritance, he can now quit his petty civil service job and retire completely to that “hole” and wallow in feeling—as we say today—disrespected. He sets up situations sure to inspire disgust in the most benign acquaintances, then spends his time alone mulling over his shame and plotting a revenge which is sure to backfire on him. Finally he turns his spite onto someone more despised and helpless than he, so that he can enjoy feeling even more base, analyzing and re-analyzing his “insincere motives, so deliberately invented, so bookish,” until he avows that he cannot stand himself. Neither can we. And we suspect that our revulsion, too, thrills him. 

The underground of Dostoevsky’s spiteful man resembles the lower depths of the Christian Hell—with this particular tormented sinner uninterested in purgatory or redemption. For both Ellison’s invisible man and Wright’s Fred Daniels, the underground is a shelter from danger, but Ellison’s hero definitely plans to resurface with his story. Fred Daniels has no plans except survival, moment by moment; the rising of hope for more than that becomes his undoing.  

Women hardly exist in the worlds of these three men. One old black woman is the savior of Ellison’s hero when he is sick and starving, and she is the only person who does not betray his trust. Dostoevsky’s spiteful man pretends to love a vulnerable young prostitute, only to insult her when she returns sincere love. In Fr ed Daniels’ desperate flight into the sewers, there are no women, not even in his fantasies or his memory. 

How do the three books hold up at second reading? Invisible Man seems a bit schematic, the symbolism, the surrealism of the race riot, a tad liter ary and abstract. But some parts seem better than at first reading. For instance, in the 1950s Ellison was criticized for his “too-negative” satire on the Communist Party USA; in the years since reading the novel, I’ve read and known a lot more communists and ex-communists whose now less-censored memories of those days match Ellison’s take on “The Brotherhood.” 

Perhaps the book is less stunning only because we are more familiar than we were fifty years ago with the racist poison it digs up. The final words still hold a quiet power, perhaps more than they did in 1950: “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you.” Maybe because I’m 50 years older, I feel even more strongly that the disillusionments, damage, failures, lies, and stupidity that the young Invisible Man barely survived are those of most human lives, in his case writ large and deepened by racial oppression. Ellison had to have a fine mind and a large heart not to lose sight of that. 

Reading the Dostoevsky story still feels li ke being at a party or a bar, cornered by a mean drunk who enjoys watching you writhe as he repeats his sordid confession over and over. I hate to admit that I was forced to find myself identifying as well—just a little—with Dostoevsky’s spiteful old bore. He is that inner voice that wakes me at three in the morning to pick at the scab over some old insult or lie or neglect I suffered—or, worse, inflicted on someone else. 

He feeds me the words of the retort I should have spouted against some slight or i nsult, but didn’t think of at the time. He nags me about my own stupid, hurtful remarks that I should have swallowed, or rehearses the apology I should have made before it was too late. My great distaste for these sadomasochistic creeps who infect Dostoe vsky’s work may simply reflect my distaste for the trace of them I try not to see in myself.  

But this time around, Richard Wright’s novella—the shortest of the three—was a revelation, an economical, poetic evocation of much more than I had seen the fi rst time, when only Fred’s victimhood registered with me. I would be happy to identify with Fred, to see more of myself in him. 

He is clever, inventive, creative, curious, sensitive, moral, and—given the chance, which he wasn’t—loving. He has no pretensi ons, no self-pity, but plenty of courage, along with an unconquerable love of life. Yet he isn’t an idealized abstraction; he is a real, credible, “ordinary” man, unable to intellectualize the deep wisdom of his feelings, yet not simple. The awful words o f the bad cop, “You’ve got to shoot his kind. They’d wreck things,” read like a word of hope in these dark days, a promise that his spirit can still upsurge and “wreck things” as they are.  

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