SOURCE: Mayberry, Susan Neal. “Symbols in the Sewer: A Symbolic Renunciation of Symbols in Richard Wright's ‘The Man Who Lived Underground’.” South Atlantic Review 54, no. 1 (January 1989): 71-83.

In the following essay, Mayberry explores the heavy symbolism of Wright's short story “The Man Who Lived Underground.”

The fact that Richard Wright's “The Man Who Lived Underground” is somewhat paradoxically a long short story prepares its reader for its multiple ambiguities and explains the range of interpretations that have resulted from them. The short story has been variously described as a depiction of the social and ethical problems facing the American black (Gounard 381), a “perfect modern allegory” exposing the sewage of the human heart (Margolies), a rendering of Freudian guilt (Fabre, “Underground”; Margolies), a surrealistic search for identity (Bakish; Fabre, “Naturalism”), the paradox of the sightless seer who comes to visualize his invisibility (Felgar), a study in pessimism (Brignano; Everette...