Underground Airlines (Winters)

Discussion Questions
We'll add the publisher's questions if and when they're available; in the meantime use these LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for Underground Airlines...then take off on your own:

1. Why does Victor refer to himself as having no name...

As being not really a person at all. A man was missing, that's all, missing and hiding, and I was not a person but a manifestation of will. I was a mechanism — a device. That's all I was.

2. (Follow-up to Question #1) Victor is a complex character with layers of emotion and history. Talk about Victor and his conflicted nature regarding his past and his present self.

3. This book falls under the genre of "alternate history." Describe the America as presented in Underground Airlines. What is it like, particularly the Four Hard" states?

4. The novel presents the idea that societal change is difficult if not impossible. According to Victor, "shit does not change." Absent a bloody, hard-fought civil war would it have been possible to transform our society? Consider that many in this alternate reality oppose the Hard Four's continuation of slavery. Consider, too, that slavery still exists in the Hard Four.

5.Talk about Victor's own change by the novel's end. Does he achieve redemption?

6. Should a white man have even attempted to write this book?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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