콜슨 화이트헤드의 『지하철도』에 나타난 폭력의 양상과 자유를 향한 여정

Aspects of Violence and the Journey to Freedom in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad

The purpose of this paper is to examine the ways in which Colson Whitehead attempts to make a poignant critique of the problematics of the white people’s violence toward the black slaves, demonstrating the struggle for freedom that black slaves show in his Pulitzer prize-winning novel, The Underground Railroad (2016). Whitehead presents the plight of the black slaves’ and their struggle for freedom by adopting the speculative neo-slave narrative genre. The underground railroad in Whitehead’s novel is not an imaginary or symbolic route that the black slaves used to escape from the bondage of slavery with the aid of the white abolitionists, but includes actual trains and tunnels. Cora, the protagonist of the novel as well as the granddaughter Ajarri and the daughter of Mable, heroically escapes from the Randall plantation in Georgia to travel to South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Indiana, and finally somewhere to the North. She went through various ordeal because of the slave catcher Ridgeway, who is the embodiment of the manifest destiny. By fighting against Ridgeway, Cora finally escapes from him and from the slavery system, reaching to the land of freedom. I want to emphasize that Whitehead’s novel is not just a critique of the American slavery system, but it is also a scathing critique of the violence by white supremacy under the present government.