The Subterraneans
The opening page (second paragraph) offers an explanation of the title of the novel. The subterraneans, the narrator explains, is a term coined by a poet friend of his named Adam Moorad (who is based on real-life Beat poet Alan Ginsberg.) Even before this information is offered, however, metaphor is used to forward another character of even greater significance:
“Julien Alexander is the angel of the subterraneans.”
Is That Where the Title Came From?
Maybe a very popular film of the early 1980’s about a reunion of a group of friends that formed in the 1960’s derived its title from this novel. Then again, maybe not. But the tone and mood of the metaphor within context certainly seems applicable to a film about looking backward wistfully:
“as where then before, it was recognition of the need for my return to world-wide love as a great writer should do, like a Luther, a Wagner, now this warm thought of greatness is a big chill in the wind”
Physical Description
The narrator speaks in a hipster jive that is not exactly conducive to the typical sort of comparison through simile, though every now and then a conventional example slips in. Well, not entirely conventional perhaps, but close enough:
“Mardou, wearing Adam’s long black velvet jacket (for her long) a mad long scarf too, looking like a little Polish underground girl or boy in a sewer beneath the city”
The Girl
Mardou Fox is the fictionalized version of a real-life young love of the author. The sublimity of the metaphorical language with which the narrator endows her essence of being suggests that she might well have been the love of his life:
“No girl had ever moved me with a story of spiritual suffering and so beautifully her soul showing out radiant as an angel wandering in hell and the hell the self-same streets I’d roamed in watching”
Philosophizing
Much philosophizing takes places by the narrator over the course of the narrative. This offers up plentiful opportunities for the narrative to take some metaphorical twists and turns, especially as the language and syntax and grammar is loose and slipper to begin with:
“I could have made my whole life like that morning just on the strength of pure understanding and willingness to live and go along, God it was all the most beautiful thing that ever happened to me in its own way - but it was all sinister.”
