vol 25 no1, 2025

Existential Alienation in Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground

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Existential Alienation in Richard Wright's The Man Who Lived Underground

Ilhem Djaalab	Mohammad Shaheen
Faculty of Literature and Languages	Faculty of Literature and Languages
University of Jordan	University of Jordan
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Received :11/11/2022                                                               Accepted :17/10/2023

Abstract:

This research focuses on examining the concept of existential alienation in Richard Wright's recently published novel, The Man Who Lived Underground (2021). It traces the protagonist, Fred Daniels' experience of estrangement and separation from the world, reality, and the self. It sheds light on the causes of these experiences mainly the racial violence, oppression and dehumanization. It shows how these affect the psyche of the black man leading to his reevaluation then rejection of the world and its values from an existential perspective. This study is theoretically framed using Frantz Fanon's framework on the concept of alienation particularly in his book Black Skin, White Masks to scrutinize the relationship between racial oppression against blacks and the adaptation of existential alienation as a response to the absurdity of the anti-black world that, abuses, rejects and equally dehumanizes the African American man. The protagonist in Wright's novel exhibits some typical features of an alienated man including loss of sense of reality, memory fragmentation, dehumanization, and deformation of character.

Keywords: existential alienation, estrangement, oppression, The Man Who Lived Underground, Wright, Fanon, African American.

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