Title: The Literary Metaphors in The Underground Railroad

Abstract: In The Underground Railroad, the African American writer Colson Whitehead subtly blends the reality and fiction into a legendary story to reflect the current American society and politics. There are ubiquitous literary metaphors in the novel, which convey historical and cultural implications. These literary metaphors not only make the content of the novel richer with multi-meanings, vividly show a period of American history, attack the slave system once existed in the United States which distorted human nature and subverted human civilization, but also profoundly reveal the complexity of the human nature.

Keywords: Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad, metaphors, carnival

Author: Li Lin, Professor, Foreign Languages School, Northeast Normal University, Changchun, Jilin, China.