On the Survival Predicaments of African Americans in Colson Whitehead’s <i>The Underground Railroad</i> from the Perspective of Nietzsche’s Tragedy Aesthetics

Abstract

Colson Whitehead (1969-) is a celebrated contemporary African American writer who was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, in 2017 and 2020. His eighth novel, The Underground Railroad, has received widespread acclaim since its publication in 2016. It is a gripping tale of a girl’s unflinching will to free herself from the yoke of slavery through a real subterranean railway in the antebellum south. While there are numerous reviews of this book, they generally focus on its narrative strategies, artistic techniques, historical and cultural connotations, motifs, and African Americans’ traumatic experiences under psychoanalysis. However, few critics pay attention to a critical philosophical point of view that this paper will explore. Based on Nietzsche’s tragedy aesthetics through text analysis, this paper aims to address three research questions pertaining to the survival predicaments of African Americans: 1) In the Apollonian dream state, what beautiful illusions and visions have African Americans and white people created to cover up a cruel reality? 2) On the terrifying side of Dionysus, what barbaric violence have they all committed to tear the beautiful veil? 3) On the joyful side of Dionysus, what strategies of redemption have they all employed to deal with the barbarism that they have all faced? This paper concludes that the survival predicaments of African Americans seem to have been solved with the Apollonian spirit. In the Dionysian state, however, this moderating effect only points to the fact that many of them are superficially respected and tolerated. In effect, African Americans have been arduously struggling against social prejudice and racial discrimination all along. Hence, it is hoped that this paper may arouse people’s awareness of this deep-rooted social problem, so as to alleviate the survival predicaments of African Americans in a white-dominated American society.