Underground

Many writers have seen through the flaws of the human World and in response have created alternative versions of it in their literary works. Sometimes these versions are better, sometimes they are worse, and sometimes they are just different. Richard Wright's The Man Who Lived Underground and Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere both describe two underground worlds that mirror the "real" World above. They are quite similar in their settings, characters and in the ways they explore and reject the value system of the World above the ground. However, they differ in their essence, as Gaiman's story is pure fantasy, filled with magical and legendary people, creatures, and places, while Wright's one is based to a large extend in reality, and so cannot completely separate itself from it. This paper tries to explore more profoundly the similarities and differences between these two underground worlds through a close examination of descriptions, images, symbols and characters and aims at coming to a conclusion about their true relation to the "real" World.

The first most obvious similarity between the two underground worlds of Wright and Gaiman is their outer appearance. Darkness, bad smell, shadows, dirt, water and mud, together with manholes and underground sellers as their main entrances, are just some of the common characteristics that they share. Of course, Neverwhere is a fantasy novel, so the out of the ordinary, the magical, dominates the setting. Strange people and creatures; magical and legendary societies and courts; tube stations that exist in two completely different dimensions at the same time, or do not exist at all in "real" London; underground bridges and passageways that have no equivalent above; angels and beasts; floating markets that are there, or are not, depending on where one enters them from; all these constitute Gaiman's Underworld and cannot be found in the sewers in Wright's story.

However, there is a feeling of the magical in Fred Daniels's underground world too. Time ceases to exist down there for him the same way it does for Gaiman's main character, Richard. Also, ordinary events, such as the slow burning of a match or the transformation of sounds, seem strange and unearthly (Fabre 103). The lack of light and the uselessness of sight as a tool for exploring the environment also enhance the feeling of abnormality. On the whole, as Michel Fabre argues: "Strangeness, bewilderment, the supernatural- most of the elements of the fantastic are combined in this narrative. It would only require striking out several descriptions that are too explicit for us to imagine ourselves on another planet" (103). However, as Fabre proceeds to explain, the author does not let us go off entirely into an imaginary world, but always introduces some realistic notation that brings us back down to the familiar, to reality (103). According to him (Fabre), Wright's purpose in doing so is to "lead us to question the familiar, something we would refuse to do when reading a dreamlike tale" (104).

This is not the case with Gaiman's Underworld, which is completely set apart from the ordinary world of London above. It is impossible to live or know both at the same time- one can embrace either the magical reality or the dull and ordinary one. This is due to a large extent on the lack of points of contact between the two worlds: the "undergrounders" know about the existence of London above, but the ordinary people not only have no knowledge of the world below their city, but they are unable to see it or anyone related to it. Their minds reject everything magical and out of the ordinary, so the underground society becomes invisible to them.

Fred Daniels and Richard also become invisible when they find themselves by accident in underground worlds they cannot escape, at least in the beginning. Fred Daniels is accused of a murder he did not commit, and as a black in a white, racist society, he has no other choice than to run away from the police and to hide in the sewers. There, away from the eyes of society, he looses his identity, turning from a black person fleeing the unjust law, into an Everyman, a member of humanity, and as such is doomed to bear the eternal guilt of existence (Fabre 100). Richard, on the other hand, becomes a "non person" in the World above after making the choice to help a strange injured girl instead of to go to a dinner with his fiancй and her boss. By doing this, Richard turns his back not only to society as he knows it, but to reality as he knows it as well. By rejecting reality, he allows it to reject him back (Folk Tales 1). The next day he finds out he has been "erased" from his World: nobody can see him anymore, his credit cards do not work, his landlord lends his apartment to others, and his fiancй does not recognize him. He ceases to exist in London above, like all the others he meets underneath. As Marquis de Carabbas tells Richard: "London Below -the Underside- is inhabited by people who fell trough the cracks in the world" (Gaiman 87).

Indeed, at first glance most of the people who live in this magical world are those who never get a second look by the passers-by above the ground. These include the beggars, the street musicians, the ragged and dirty homeless men and women who sleep in tube stations or in abandoned sellers. They are invisible to society, have been rejected by it, or "flushed down the toilet", much like Fred Daniels himself and all those he meets in the sewers: the black people singing to God under the ground amidst the sewer smell; the dead baby; the corpse in the morgue. In Wright's story these are people for whom there is no hope, because they are just part of a society that is flawed in its essence, in its values, while in Gaiman's novel the "undergrounders" seem to be content with their strange world below, which has its own rules, own map, own logic, and do not feel a need to be part of London above. When Richard asks the rat speaker Anaesthesia if she "ever tried to return to all this", gesturing at the "Quite, warm, inhabited houses. Late-night cars. The real world...," she shakes her head, saying: "You can't. It's one or the other. Nobody ever gets both" (Gaiman 105). In contrast, Fred Daniels soon realizes he cannot stay forever in the better world he has constructed for himself below the ground. He needs to go up in the "dead light", to be a prophet and tell the people that the way they live is essentially wrong. "He has understood the necessity of human solidarity, not as much from a pragmatic or moral point of view as from a philosophical or existential perspective" (Fabre 99).

In order to grasp better the essential similarities and differences between