The Gateway To Freedom: A Literary Analysis

Expansion of the truth allows us as humans to closely examine the individual truths of a situation and hence better understand the whole. Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad utilizes embellishment of the truths of pre-Civil War America to help us as the audience better understand this era in history, through describing the fictional account of Cora, a runaway slave, and her adventures to freedom through an actual underground railroad. However, there is an extent to which fiction can be used to inform fact, and when that limit has been reached, the truth must also be considered. Eric Foner’s Gateway to Freedom serves as a sort of foil to The Underground Railroad, as it attempts to encapsulate the whole establishment by providing a historical account of the many parties who helped run the Underground Railroad. …show more content…
To better understand what is to be taken from Whitehead and Foner’s books as individual works as well as from them both as a whole, …show more content…
As previously stated, this type of focus would not be possible in the nonfictional genre unless either a very deep investigation into the character of an individual was undertaken, or if the stories of many individuals were compiled. Even then, the former would not fully encompass all that an author would wish to communicate, and the latter would still be held together with the assumption of the experiences being separate instances. Considering both of these limitations, an analysis must be undertaken to decide if there is benefit in the union of many historical occurrences to make a whole to be