Mid-Term Essay Response
Sana Rahman
ENGL 338
American Ethnic Literature
Fall 2014
“What do you suppose he’s suffering from? …Maybe it’s because he lives in a white
man’s world” (Wright 81). In “The Man Who Lived Underground,” Fred Daniels is a young
black man who is wrongly accused of murdering a woman and then is coerced into signing a
confession to the crime. Daniels flees from the police by going underground, into the sewer,
where he experiences an array of intense emotions and events. These experiences eventually lead
him to return and face Lawson, who is the leader of the three policemen who are after him, and
ultimately, murder him. When asked why he chose to shoot and kill Daniels, Lawson utters, “I
had to… You’ve got to shoot that kind. They’d wreck things” (Wright 84). It is my opinion that
Lawson was completely wrong, even criminal, in choosing to shoot Fred Daniels because of his
own fear of the “kind” of men, like Daniels, who are unafraid of opposition and seek to find
answers which others are afraid to find.
