Identity
The identity of the protagonist of this story is in flux right from the title; doomed never to be known as Fred Daniels, but always as the man who lived underground. On a narrative level his identity is also immediately put into jeopardy since the police have either mistaken him or chosen to identity him as a murderer. The issue of a confused identity is a running a theme: at various time he is mistaken for a paying cinema customer and a store employee. On the flip side, the wrong people have been identified as responsible for the crime he actually has committed while underground. Even he himself is confused by what comes outs when he tries simply to write his name using a typewriter for the first time: freddaniels. And, of course, there is the fact that he is essentially reduced to the level of an animal unworthy of living in society aboveground by the officer who shoots him, Lawson.
A Corrupt Legal System
The cops beat a confession out of Fred. After the cops fail to beat a confession out of Thompson, the night watchman accused of stealing the jewelry, the man commits suicide. Fred is publicly accused in the media of being an escaped killer on the loose even though his confession should not be legally admissible, meanwhile the jewelry store employee who also stole from the same vault as Fred goes scot-free. The entire system is corrupt rather than just a few so-called bad apple bad cops. The media and supposedly law-abiding citizens all contribute their share to maintaining the systemic unfairness and equality of the system.
Seeing the Light
The ironic theme of the story is that it is only by going into the darkness that Fred becomes capable of seeing the light. The entire perspective on everything is changed by going underground. From the sewer, Fred peers into the world existing aboveground from backdoors and by going in through the outdoors and breaking through walls and peering through tiny cracks in the windowsill. This literal change in perspective offers him access to a metaphorical change as he comes to understand how things really are and how everything is constructed to keep people from looking too closely so that they might, as Lawson puts it, “wreck things.”
