A Chinese Box Of History And Reality

Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad is a uniquely brilliant American contemporary work of fiction.The novel is set in the antebellum south,narrating the adventure of a runway slave girl,Cora,who escapes from the southern America to the north by taking the fictional “underground railroad.” The canonical masterpiece disrupts the settled sense of the past and opens up new vistas for the form of the novel itself.It has been widely acclaimed since its publication in 2016.This thesis takes as its basic point of consideration a deliberate reference of The Underground Railroad as a slavery novel to Toni Morrison's novel Beloved,and a remarkable resemblance between The Underground Railroad and Johnathan Swift's satirical travelogue Gulliver's Travels.Then a deep exploration is made of the explicit and implicit intertextual relationships among these three novels,meanwhile,like a Chinese box in which a smaller box can be embedded into a bigger one,these three novels embed and acknowledge history on the one hand,and criticize reality on the other.The Underground Railroad creates a story about fleeing,dedication and redemption by intertextulizing and transcending the slavery novel and the satirical travelogue.The Underground Railroad acknowledges history by inventing history and satirizes reality by embedding it,thus causing literature to be a eternal calling for conscience,justice and freedom.By the wildly inventive use of intertextuality,Whitehead's novel enhances its originality in aspects such as the conception of creation,language style and the construction of self-identity theme,and enriches the evolvement of the two genres of novel in narration,plot and theme.All this further brings out the potent literariness of the novel.