Book Review: The Underground Railroad For Teachers of History, Memory, and Literature

I’ll be honest: I picked up The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead mainly because it had a Pulitzer Prize stamp on the cover. With so many books in the world and so little time to read them all, I figured it was a safe bet to trust something that had already been singled out. I didn’t really register that the Pulitzer is an American prize. I just thought, “Well, someone somewhere thinks this is excellent—why not?”

I didn’t expect this novel to unsettle me, stretch the way I understand history, and make me question how I teach literature. I’ve always been drawn to historical fiction. There’s something about the genre that makes the past feel intimate—textured with human detail, emotion, and the complexity that often gets flattened in textbooks. I turn to historical novels to better understand the forces that shaped people’s lives, and to see the echoes of those forces in the present. So, when I picked up The Underground Railroad, I assumed I was entering a story firmly anchored in American history—a novel that would help me (and possibly my students) better understand the institution of slavery in the United States.

And it is that. It is a novel about slavery. About escape. About the haunting architecture of racial violence in America. But it is also, in the deepest sense, a novel about all of us who live in the aftermath of inherited trauma, fractured memory, and official narratives that too often leave crucial stories out. What Whitehead does is take the conventions of historical fiction—its grounding in research, its evocation of another time—and crack them open. He doesn't simply reconstruct history; he remixes it, warps it, and reimagines it to ask questions that remain painfully urgent today.

A Literal Underground, and a Metaphorical One Too

One of Colson Whitehead’s most striking narrative choices is his reimagining of the Underground Railroad—the historical secret network that helped enslaved people escape—as a literal train system operating beneath the ground. There are tunnels, tracks, stations, conductors. At first, this might seem like a creative flourish, a playful bending of historical fact. But as the novel unfolds, it becomes clear that this literalization is central to its power.

By turning the metaphor into a tangible, physical system, Whitehead gives weight to the idea of resistance. It’s not just symbolic; it has structure, architecture, labor. It is built—through courage, desperation, and collective effort. This hidden world beneath the surface becomes a haunting metaphor for everything societies try to bury: uncomfortable truths, collective traumas, suppressed memories, even entire identities.

If I were to ask my students, after reading the opening chapters, “What histories lie buried beneath the surface of your own region?” I can imagine the kinds of answers they might offer—echoes of colonial rule, state violence, silenced languages, or lost communities. They would begin to uncover their own “railroads,” their own networks of silence and survival, shaped by very different but no less urgent histories.

Teaching in Places That Forget

One of the deepest threads running through the novel is the question of memory. What do we remember, and what are we told to forget? Whitehead doesn’t just give us a story about the brutality of slavery—he gives us a story about how societies metabolize trauma. Some suppress it with denial. Others distract with progress. Some disguise it as benevolence. And others still, quite simply, erase.

In general, there’s a quiet but persistent pressure in the Philippine school system to stay “focused on the future”—meaning, employability. Dwelling on the traumatic parts of our history is seen as too tedious, too costly, and ultimately unnecessary, so they’re often pushed aside. But how can we understand where we are—or who we are—if we don’t remember what came before?

This hits even harder now, with reports of students falling behind or failing both local and international assessments. People point to broken curriculums, overworked teachers, and unreliable internet—and yes, those are real and pressing issues. But I can’t help but ask: are we also losing sight of what real learning should be?

When schools focus too much on rules, grades, and test scores, we stop teaching students how to think. When we skip over the difficult parts of history, we avoid the hard questions—the very ones that most need asking. And how can young people prepare for the future if we don’t help them make sense of the past?

Reading The Underground Railroad in this context reminded me that literature can be a counterforce to shallow learning. It slows us down. It makes us ask difficult questions. It tells stories that resist simplification. And more than that, it helps students begin to imagine freedom—not just as a political right or a future goal, but as a practice rooted in memory, imagination, and the courage to confront what has been buried

A Novel That Travels Well

Though deeply rooted in American history, The Underground Railroad travels well. Its themes—oppression, resistance, forgetting, survival—are global. Its form, a blend of historical fiction and speculative narrative, invites students to think critically not only about content, but about genre: Why does Whitehead blur the lines between fact and fiction? How does that blurring help us get closer to emotional and political truth?

Cora, the novel’s protagonist, moves through different states, each one functioning as a kind of speculative allegory. One presents itself as a racial utopia while secretly conducting eugenics experiments. Another has outlawed Black life entirely, declaring it illegal for Black people even to exist within its borders. These aren't just imagined scenarios—they echo historical and contemporary realities, from apartheid to sterilization programs to genocide.

In class, we can draw parallels to our regions: their banned histories, marginalized languages, buried massacres and desapericidos. The Underground Railroad allows a shared vocabulary to talk about these difficult truths, and to reflect on the ways literature can do what textbooks often cannot.

Students may have grown cynical about history. But engaged with the suspense of Cora’s flight, the unpredictability of the settings, the surreal but eerily plausible scenarios, they would eventually ask the better questions—not just about American slavery, but about their own histories, their own governments, their own families.

Why We Should Read This—Wherever We Teach

Good literature does more than tell stories—it opens up hidden rooms in our collective consciousness. For those of us teaching in postcolonial or politically complex contexts, this novel offers a kind of mirror. Not a direct reflection, but a slanted one—just enough to let us see our own silences and scars refracted through the experiences of others. It affirms the global relevance of historical fiction, especially when that fiction refuses to give easy answers or tidy resolutions.

If you’re a teacher looking for a book that can deepen your students’ thinking about history, justice, and storytelling, The Underground Railroad is worth your time. Not because it won a Pulitzer. But because it dares to dig into what most of us are taught to leave buried.

Suggested Readings for Broader Contexts:

• Toni Morrison, Beloved (U.S.) – Memory, haunting, and the cost of freedom

• Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat (Kenya) – Colonial resistance and collective betrayal

• Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (India) – Forbidden histories and broken families

• Edwidge Danticat, The Farming of Bones (Haiti/Dominican Republic) – On genocide and forgetting

• Yvonne Vera, Butterfly Burning (Zimbabwe) – Womanhood under colonial rule

• Jose Rizal, Noli Me Tangere (Philippines) – A cornerstone of anti-colonial literature

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