The Intuitionist

Colson Whitehead

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1999

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

“Down,” Part 1

“Down,” Part 2

“Up,” Part 1

“Up,” Part 2

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Elevators/Elevation

Central to Whitehead’s allegory surrounding racial uplift is the symbol of the elevator—and elevation more broadly. At its most basic level, the elevator symbolizes 20th century modernity, as the invention made the growth of densely-populated, vertically-rising cities possible. By extension, the elevator also offers some measure of racial uplift; it is vertical cities like the book’s setting—modeled after mid-century New York—where Black Americans like Lila Mae and Pompey are afforded far greater opportunities than in the small Southern towns where they grew up.

This racial uplift is also illusory. The book’s setting is perhaps the only place in the country where Lila Mae could obtain a job as a Black female elevator inspector. She also faces daily indignities from white colleagues and strangers alike, and her bosses largely view her as a token—a gesture to an increasingly diverse and progressive constituency. Lila Mae’s unique position and the allegory of racial uplift are both embodied by the Fanny Briggs Elevator Stack, which Lila Mae is assigned to inspect. Named for an enslaved woman who taught herself to read and escaped to the North, the elevator should be a powerful symbol for Black progress. However, it crashes to the ground thanks to a “catastrophic accident,” emphasizing the perils of racial uplift.

Detective Novel Tropes

Whitehead soaks his narrative in the conventions of detective novels, particularly those written in the 1930s and 1940s by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. The Intuitionist includes a broad cast of supporting characters with suspect motives, a twisty plot that keeps readers on their heels, and a “MacGuffin,” an object pursued by all the characters but which ultimately has little relevance to the central mystery at hand—in this case, Fulton’s lost diary pages. The most important similarity lies with Lila Mae, who shares many qualities with classic detective heroes like The Maltese Falcon’s Sam Spade and The Big Sleep’s Philip Marlowe. These characters are outsiders who put on a tough face to the world but who are nevertheless intensely moral individuals driven by a sense of duty and justice.

Where The Intuitionist sets itself apart is in how it subverts these tropes. For example, while Spade and Marlowe’s outsider status is largely self-imposed, white society makes Lila Mae an outsider by virtue of her racial identity. Moreover, the mysteries surrounding the Fanny Briggs crash and the nature of Intuitionism are resolved in an intentionally anti-climactic fashion. The Briggs crash was a mere accident, and the “second elevation” promised by Intuitionism is little more than Fulton’s private joke. Of much more interest to Whitehead are the metaphysical mysteries Lila Mae encounters with respect to her identity and race in mid-century America.

Literacy

In both antebellum narratives of escaped enslaved people and post-Reconstruction attempts at racial uplift, literacy is a foundational principle. According to racial uplift theory, educating oneself and then sharing the material benefits of that education with one’s community is central to the project of Black advancement. While literacy is an unalloyed good, the hopes of a community cannot rest on this alone, particularly when systems of oppression remain deeply entrenched.

Whitehead seems to propose a “new literacy,” like the one Lila Mae achieves through reading Fulton’s diaries anew. Having discovered his identity as a Black man, Lila Mae is struck by Fulton’s descriptions of elevation in an entirely new way. Under this interpretation, the dream of uplift is beautiful and alluring, but it is also exactly that: a dream. This isn’t to say that oppressed peoples should give up on uplift; on the contrary, Lila Mae continues Fulton’s work on his behalf. Rather, it may simply mean that hope must be accompanied by a keen understanding of what one is up against.