The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.īut you know what? We change lives. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.” My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. “Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight.
Despite these flaws, the book offers many testaments to Whitehead’s considerable talents and examines a deeply relevant and disturbing period of American history.Ībout a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”: The points made are powerful and true, but the novel sometimes suffers from a didactic impulse that restates explicitly what is already clear. The point of view sometimes swings jarringly between essayistic pronouncement and interior monologue, and Cora remains something of a cipher – less a fully realized fictional character than a means of making points. The novel is less successful in delineating distinct and psychologically plausible characters. He also captures the hypocrisy of both white slave owners and northern whites who consider themselves enlightened and unprejudiced. Whitehead shows how the miseries of slavery extend far beyond physical punishment and forced labor, infecting and corrupting the smallest pleasures with fear and humiliation. "The Underground Railroad" has moments of poignancy and horror and bleak humor. One ad complains that a slave ran away “without provocation,” as if the owner were genuinely surprised that someone might object to being a slave.īy signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy.Īlready a subscriber? Log in to hide ads. These are astonishing in their cruelty and self-delusion, and they make clear that slave owners saw slaves as tools and property. Different sections of the narrative are interrupted by the brief transcripts of actual 19th-century advertisements posted by the owners of runaway slaves. Most of the novel has firm roots in historical reality. Her mother attempts to escape when she is only 10 or 11 – ages are an approximate matter for slaves on the plantation – leaving Cora a “stray.” She endures rape, whippings, beatings, and the ceaseless psychological torment of enslavement before attempting an escape of her own while still only a teenager. But Whitehead neither disguises nor delights in the ubiquity of extreme violence, presenting it as an inescapable daily reality, a monstrous fact of life become so familiar that “travesties … were a kind of weather.”Ĭora is both a child and grandchild of slaves, and while the story touches briefly on the original abduction of her grandmother from Africa, episodes from Cora’s life on a Georgia plantation form the primary opening narrative.
#The underground railroad story slavery movie#
It’s not inevitable that this subject matter inspire serious treatment – Quentin Tarantino’s 2012 movie "Django Unchained" trivialized the suffering of slaves with its leering enjoyment of graphic torture. Whitehead depicts the perversions and horrors of slavery in 19th-century America through the story of the multiple escape attempts of a woman named Cora. His new novel, The Underground Railroad, also has passages of astounding physical violence, yet they are more deeply disturbing than any bloodshed in his previous book. While the violence of "Zone One" was more than spectacle, it had a certain moral weightlessness derived from the zombie genre. Some critics were endlessly astonished by this juxtaposition of elements, but Whitehead showed that a literary zombie novel was no contradiction. The novel was also a serious meditation on human nature composed in sentences of unerring beauty. The book was a literary zombie novel, descended in part from dozens of gore-splattered zombie movies that make human dismemberment an almost cheerful affair. Novelist Colson Whitehead's 2011 "Zone One" was essentially required to contain gruesome scenes of blood and carnage.
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