40 pages • 1 hour read
Fyodor DostoevskyNotes from Underground
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1864A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Rationality Versus Irrationality as the Foundation of Choice
The Underground Man believes that it is impossible for people to make decisions that are consistently in their best interest. Similarly, he believes that rationalism and free will are opposing concepts. This is a contradiction within rationalism that proposes that free will coincides with natural laws because people fundamentally strive for the good. In Chapter 9, he claims: “Good heavens, gentlemen, what sort of free will is left when we come to tabulation and arithmetic, when it will all be a case of twice two make four? Twice two makes four without my will. As if free will meant that!” (28). In other words, if free will corresponds with a set of predetermined laws, will ceases to be free. This is the central contradiction the Underground Man sees in the Socialists’ arguments for utopian society.
The Underground Man believes in scientific determinism, but not as the basis for human action. On the contrary, he posits that because humans are subject to a deterministic universe and have no control over experiences such as physical pain and mortality, the only way people can assert their humanity is through irrational actions. Reason accounts for only part of decision-making:
[R]eason is an excellent thing, there’s no disputing that, but reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of man’s nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole life, that is, of the whole human life including reason and all the impulses (26).
These impulses, which may motivate people’s actions despite not being in their best interest, are the irrational choices at the foundation of human individuality.
The Underground Man is not chaotic for chaos’s sake. He admits that he tries to reason through his actions and fails, becoming inevitably drawn to the opposite of what he knows is wholesome and good: “The more conscious I was of goodness and of all that was ‘sublime and beautiful,’ the more deeply I sank into my mire and the more ready I was to sink in it altogether” (8). This knowingly irrational behavior becomes its own kind of determinism for the Underground Man, and he takes perverse delight in his powerlessness against his irrationality.
Confessional Writing and Narrative Reliability
A central question in Notes from Underground is whether people can be honest, even with themselves. The Underground Man is openly unreliable. He contradicts or retracts nearly every statement he makes, even about his own character: “I was lying when I said just now that I was a spiteful official. I was lying from spite” (6). If he is “lying from spite” about being spiteful, is he actually spiteful or not? Such fundamental questions about the nature of truth in a text with an unreliable narrator are at the core of the novella.
Because Notes from Underground is a first-person narrative written in the style of a diary, the narrative presupposition is that the Underground Man’s account of events is true. By definition, a confession is a statement that reveals the truth, usually about an act that is shameful or illegal. The Underground Man refers to his writing as “confessions” (35) and insists that his lack of literary pretensions is an indicator of his narrative’s honesty: “I don’t wish to be hampered by any restrictions in the compilation of my notes. I shall not attempt any system or method. I will jot things down as I remember them” (36). He also insists that his work is not meant for readers and that this is further proof of his honesty.
Even as he strives for total honesty, the Underground Man is not certain whether it can be achieved: “I want to try the experiment whether one can, even with oneself, be perfectly open and not take fright at the whole truth” (35). Even without a readership, one still must confront one’s own demons—but this is the Underground Man’s primary occupation. In theory, someone with his high level of self-awareness would be the perfect author of a confessional. The problem is that when the Underground Man looks at himself, he hates what he sees. This sends him spiraling into convoluted reasoning, leading him back underground.
A confession implies a penance or punishment, a response to the wrongful action the confessor describes. The Underground Man writes his story about Liza to seek redemption: “Writing will be a sort of work. They say work makes man kind-hearted and honest. Well, here is a chance for me, anyway” (36). The ending is ambiguous because, though the narrative ends, the parenthetical note states that the writings continue. The reader is left to judge whether the Underground Man gains the redemption he desires, or—if he is simply writing out of boredom, as he suggests—whether his account is to be trusted at all.
The Antihero and the Paradox of Self-Improvement
The Underground Man is a self-professed antihero. He demonstrates the opposite of the typical heroic qualities of courage, action, strength, and trustworthiness. Instead, he is cowardly, inactive, weak, and unreliable. He has low self-esteem because he is unable to change his self-sabotaging behavior, and he alternates between revelry and despair at his inability to make good choices: “[T]he enjoyment was just from the too intense consciousness of one’s own degradation; it was from feeling oneself that one had reached the last barrier, that it was horrible, but that it could not be otherwise […]” (9). The pleasure the Underground Man takes in his unwholesome behavior is offset by the constant guilt and shame the behavior causes.
He yearns to change, but the same consciousness that makes him unable to act in society makes it difficult, if not impossible, for him to become a better person: “[E]ven if time and faith were still left you to change into something different you would most likely not wish to change; or if you did wish to, even then you would do nothing; because perhaps in reality there was nothing for you to change into” (9). The idea that there is “nothing to change into” questions the possibility of a true hero’s existing in what the Underground Man perceives to be the morally and intellectually corrupt world of 19th-century Russia. This reflects the author’s nihilistic perspective, which rejects established values and traditions as invalid and seeks to overturn them.
As an antihero, the Underground Man defines himself as the negative to the traditional hero’s positive qualities; however, as a human being, he still wants the benefits that positive qualities bring, such as love, friendship, and recognition. This is the paradox underlying the Underground Man’s loneliness and the reason he is not able to move forward. His meeting with Liza offers a window of hope for the mutuality he craves, but he recoils when she holds up a mirror to his true feelings. Through tears, he exclaims, “They won’t let me...I can’t be good!” (107). The “they” to whom he refers here is mysterious: He could mean society, his thoughts, or—perhaps less likely—some person or persons from his past. No one in Notes from Underground embodies the positive qualities toward which the Underground Man strives. Liza, in her innocence and ability to love, comes closest to doing so, but she is destined for a life of disgrace. The Underground Man hastens this downward spiral with his cruelty toward her. In a world without heroes, all attempts at heroism are necessarily destined to be insincere. This is the belief that turns the Underground Man’s attempts at self-improvement into a nihilistic self-aware, self-defeating parody.
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By Fyodor Dostoevsky
