The Man Who Lived Underground

Throughout “The Man Who Lived Underground,” Fred is near religion but rejects it or is rejected from it. The first connection to the aboveground that Fred encounters underground is a church. He hears the singing of a hymn and is excited to try to see it. But what he sees seems “abysmally obscene to him” (24). He begins to feel pain at the sight of Black people “groveling and begging for something they could never get” (25) and starts to hope they’d stand “unrepentant” due to the lot they’ve been given in the world. For Fred, religion has no point given that he has begun to experience something truer than he felt aboveground. The images he sees underground seem to link together in “some magical relationship” (51) that he can’t articulate. Like the money he steals—money that means nothing underground yet fascinates him due to its power aboveground—religion seems pointless to him underground. Later, aboveground, he enters the church and wants to tell the churchgoers something: “What? He did not know; but, once face to face with them, he would think of what to say” (67). Before he can even try to say his truth, he’s thrown out of the church due to his stench and appearance.