Notes from Underground

The unnamed protagonist, canonically known as “the Underground Man,” introduces himself: He is a retired 40-year-old collegiate assessor (a low-level bureaucrat) living in Saint Petersburg. He is in poor health, possibly from liver disease, though he refuses to go to the doctor, and he has a spiteful nature that manifests in a tendency for self-contradiction. He believes that it is impossible for intelligent people to succeed in his society and that “it is only the fool who becomes anything” (6).

When the Underground Man worked as a government official, he was rude to people for fun: He enjoyed seeing the “petitioners” (5) who came to him for information squirm. He did not take bribes, which was common for government officials at that time, so he took satisfaction in being a gatekeeper. He was able to retire from government service the previous year because a distant relative left him a small inheritance. Saint Petersburg is too expensive—he lives in a “wretched” (6) room and has an old, ill-natured servant—but he refuses to leave out of contrariness.

The Underground Man believes he is not successful in life because he is too conscious of the world and its problems. He contrasts himself with “men of action” (8), like the officer with whom he fought when he was a government official, who are successful and stubborn despite their lack of knowledge. The Underground Man is aware of his intelligence. He believes he is smarter than those around him but admits that he tends to ruin moments that are “sublime and beautiful” (8) by thinking or doing something depraved. He does not specify what those thoughts or actions are, but they are depraved enough that he feels shame when they occur. However, the shame transforms into intense enjoyment when he realizes that his ruining the moment through depraved actions was inevitable: It is “the enjoyment […] of despair; but in despair there are the most intense enjoyments, especially when one is very acutely conscious of the hopelessness of one’s position” (9). He describes his inability to stand up for himself and knows that he does not have the resolve to change, even though it is in his best interest.

The Underground Man details the train of thought that he and those like him experience when the need arises to avenge themselves against a slight or insult. He first explains that the “man of action” (11) who has no fear seeks vengeance without a second thought: He is aware that he was wronged, experiences anger, and feels justified in doing whatever is necessary to restore his good name. The Underground Man uses the metaphor of a wall to describe the emotional discomfort he feels at the prospect of acting assertively. The “man of action” breaks through this wall immediately, while the Underground Man overthinks the situation and never gets past the wall.

He then defines the “man of action” as a person and the conscious man as a mouse because the former is brave, but the latter is fearful and ineffective. The mouse ruminates over the wrong that he experienced and tries to avenge himself in a passive-aggressive way: “piecemeal, in trivial ways, from behind the stove, incognito, without believing either in its own right to vengeance, or in the success of its revenge” (12). These efforts inevitably hurt the mouse more than they hurt the object of its vengeance, and the mouse takes pleasure in its own debasement. He asserts that this chain of events is a law of nature that, like mathematics, cannot be refuted.

The Underground Man devotes this chapter to explaining the way that a cultivated person complains about having a toothache. The person who is “affected by progress and European civilization, a man who is ‘divorced from the soil and the national elements,’ as they express it now-a-days” (15), takes pleasure in annoying others by complaining. The complaining comes both from being in pain but having no one to blame for it and from the fact that something as primal as a toothache renders all his philosophies meaningless. The Underground Man suffered from a toothache for a month, and he knows the pleasure that comes from this kind of pain. He does not directly state that he complained incessantly, but he implies that he understands the experience. He ends by asking whether the thinker, being so full of contradictions, can experience self-respect.

The Underground Man continues his exploration of the causes of the thinking person’s necessary lack of self-respect. He admits that, due to boredom, he became offended or took the blame for actions of which he was not guilty, simply “because it was very dull to sit with one’s hands folded” (17). In those cases, he worked himself up to the point of truly feeling offended or remorseful about the invented situation. He even tried to fall in love and experienced jealousy though this, too, was a response to boredom.

He contrasts his behavior with that of the “man of action,” who feels legitimately wronged and acts on his feelings rather than stewing over them. This difference is due to a fundamental difference between the ways in which the thinker and the person who takes action view life: The thinker realizes there is no primary cause for feeling offended, while the “man of action”—who has limited intelligence—mistakes “secondary causes for primary ones” (17) and, thus, feels justified in acting accordingly to his beliefs. In exacting revenge, for instance, the “man of action” sees a lack of justice as the primary cause of his offense and works to restore that justice. In contrast, the thinker realizes that such impulses are baseless and is resigned to complaining rather than acting. Having an awareness of one’s own spiteful behavior prevents the development of self-respect in the thinking person.