Plato made sure to note they might resist with lethal force, so as to remain within the cave, introducing a note of political status quo in the allegory.

Fred Daniels, fleeing the false accusations of a brutally indifferent, racist society, was knocked from his mundane orbit into a journey to the beyond. Daniels’s chronicle is Plato’s allegory in reverse. He escapes into the city sewers, where the broader horizons awaiting him are to be found inside a cave, rather than out.

In both the short story and the novel-length The Man Who Lived Underground, the stubborn constraints of societal patterning are not in the darkness of the cave. They permeate the bright world aboveground. Daniels lowers himself toward an inner sun, the radiance of which was unknown to him while he walked the streets above the sewers.

Have we surface dwellers been shackled within the context of light and freedom, and is it a painful, forced retreat from that desirable world and into a fecund obscurity that lets us start to see “surface life” for what it is?

Did Richard Wright think of Plato and his cave as he wrote The Man Who Lived Underground, and did he consciously invert the allegory? The Dialogues of Plato in two volumes were present in Wright’s library prior to 1940.

If Wright did not hold Plato’s cave in his mind as he wrote, this modern version of the allegory nonetheless speaks to the universality and timelessness of the archetypes at work in it. Plato might well be spellbound to read Daniels’s modern exploration.

Wright’s version of this archetypal journey drives home the perverse tendency for the shackles of perception to assert their dominance with arrogance. We resist change not only because it is unknown, but because we convince ourselves our world is already the best possible version of itself. It isn’t just “better the devil you know”: worse, it is that “the devil you know is good.”

As Daniels feels his way through treacherous sewer tunnels toward the shadows of greater freedom, every citizen living out life aboveground in Wright’s unnamed city no doubt considers himself or herself more free and better off than Daniels. And as readers, comparing the stench and darkness of the sewer with the world above, we would initially agree. Only if we can embrace the dreamlike experiences that unfurl belowground can we begin to appreciate that things are not so clear-cut.

Tacit in the age-old vision quest traditions from around the world—to which Plato’s allegory bears resemblance—is the understanding that the vision seeker returns from this rite of passage enriched with insights and powers that society then benefits from. The seeker has been to places physical and metaphysical that no one else has been to, and this has tremendous value.

In The Man Who Lived Underground, there is no compatibility between Daniels’s underground experiences and the aboveground world he returns to. Within the purely racist paradigm of Wright’s own era, and of the world of his novel, Daniels is not even considered capable of any meaningful contribution to society to begin with, no matter what he might have tried to do with his life. At the outset of the narrative, he is dethroned from this already low point, relegated to even greater depths by being falsely branded a murderer. His descent from that abysmal point into the literal sewers should mark the death of any illusion that he might bring back to society something it could recognize as having worth.