They Are Sending Us To Heaven: Elevator-Citizenship in Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist (1999)

Abstract

Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist (1999) is latent with racialized metaphors surrounding elevators in the early modernization of the 20th century United States. Through the use of the black box, or perfect elevator, Whitehead renegotiates the relationship between technology and progress, questioning hierarchal assumptions that arise from the conflation of the two. My thesis seeks to examine these sites of metaphor as a lineage in prophetic tradition and the detective novel, and it's submission as a deconstruction of those very lineages.