TITLE:
On the Survival Predicaments of African Americans in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad from the Perspective of Nietzsche’s Tragedy Aesthetics
AUTHORS:
Min Peng
KEYWORDS:
Whitehead, The Underground Railroad, Illusions and Visions, Barbarism, Redemption, Survival Predicaments
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Philosophy,
Vol.12 No.1,
February
28,
2022
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.