The Underground Railroad Literary Analysis

At first glance, an examination of the totality of historical fiction seems rather trivial—showing little to no purpose other than displaying a historical concept; but with some deconstruction, the genre reveals itself to be much more complex. Historical fiction adopts the factual material from a moment in history with the intent of using it in the development of a fictional narrative, opening the door for the use of a variety of literary devices that would be inoperative otherwise. The genre of historical fiction, as displayed in Colson Whitehead’s novel, “The Underground Railroad”, stresses interpretation of history through fictional humanization and other literary devices, which creates a catalyst for emotional appeal in the reader—an appeal …show more content…
Aristotle, a Greek philosopher developed the rhetorical model of persuasion, a model with three separate categories (ethos, pathos, and logos) that discuss human appeal. Each Greek word corresponds with an appeal (Ethos appeals to ethics, pathos appeals to emotions, and logos appeals to logic) that represents what should appeal humans by nature. Historical fiction and history differ in that they use two seemingly contrasting methods of appeal, pathos and logos (the third method is irrelevant), to discuss the same topic from the past. Previously, it was mentioned that history and historical fiction are relatively indistinguishable aside from the factuality of the content, but now we can see that they meet two completely different human appeals, resulting in divergent reactions from the audience. If we were to scan through “The Underground Railroad” and highlight the appeals it would be littered with pathos (the appeal to emotion), and focus primarily on the emotional appeal. Throughout the novel, Cora witnesses a vast group of her acquaintances get murdered and after the first couple of deaths, Cora and the reader seem to become desensitized to the tragedy, similarly to how readers of a historical textbook become desensitized while looking at the never-ending deaths of the time period. The author uses Cora’s point of view to develop the emotion that would otherwise be diminished by discussing the lists Cora writes about her peers. On page 215, the author describes Cora writing an inventory of the people who had passed away in an effort to show that the lost people, “were not reduced to sums but multiplied by their kindnesses” (Whitehead 215). By recognizing the individuals that had passed away and not allowing them to be “reduced to sums” Whitehead was able to create pathos—an emotional appeal that instilled itself in the reader,