Part I:

Chapter 1 Summary:

The Underground Man, as the protagonist is generally referred to, introduces himself in the opening of the first chapter. A footnote by the author informs us from the start that this protagonist is a fictional character but that people like him must exist in the present cultural setting. The footnote lays out the goal of the first part of the novel, which is to explain how such individuals come into being.

The Underground Man begins by stating that he is sick, spiteful, and unpleasant. He explains that his liver is diseased but he refuses to see a doctor out of spite even though he respects the medical profession. He is forty years old and used to work for the civil service, but was a very rude official and tortured the petitioners who came to see him. He then explains that, in fact, he is not at all spiteful and would certainly have been more pleasant if someone had only shown him some sign of friendship. Once again he reverses his position, saying that if he accepted some such token of friendship he would be tortured by shame.

The protagonist says that in fact he was never a rude official, but had just lied to the reader out of spite; he instantly goes on to say that though he had tried to be spiteful he could not be because his nature contradicted it. His nature would not allow him to become anything or to have any character at all, since intelligent men cannot have character. Men of character and action, on the other hand, are never intelligent. This is what he believes at the age of forty and must therefore belong to the wisdom of old age; forty is extreme old age since no one should ever live past forty. But he himself will live past forty even though it is indecent. He lives in a poor room in St. Petersburg, which is bad both for his finances and for his health, but he will not move. The chapter concludes with the Underground Man's affirmation that he plans to talk about himself because this is the subject that gives a decent man pleasure.

Chapter 1 Analysis:

The footnote that opens this chapter serves to focus the entire work and also to give us a way of approaching it. Dostoevsky stresses the point that although the Underground Man is not a real person but a literary invention, people like him must exist given the nature of society and culture at the time. The purpose of the novel, then, is twofold. First, it must trace the emergence of a character such as the Underground Man within contemporary society and show the inevitability of such individuals existing given the cultural conditions. Second, since the Underground Man is clearly a disaffected and unpleasant character, the novel serves both implicitly and explicitly to criticize a culture that inevitably produces such individuals. Responding to the contemporary escapist trend of writing novels dealing with the past, Dostoevsky ironically points out that his protagonist is a character "of the recent past," thus forcing the reader to encounter in the novel not the remoteness of past centuries, but the reality of the mid-nineteenth century.

The text is full of contradictions from the very beginning. We are told at the outset that the Underground Man is sick, spiteful, unpleasant, superstitious, and educated. He presents us also with very concrete ways of seeing him. We know that his liver is diseased, that he is forty years old, and that he worked as a civil servant. These are all descriptions that attempt to help us understand exactly who the Underground Man is. Yet before we have had time to settle into an understanding of his personality, the narrator obscures our view.

First, the Underground Man tells us that though he will not see doctors out of spite, he does not know who this spite is directed against; that is, he is aware of certain predispositions in himself, but not of their purposes or origins. In fact, as he later tells us, he is not even spiteful but merely wants to be. Nor was he ever a rude official as he had previously told us. The Underground Man specifically insists that he could not become anything and that an intelligent man in the nineteenth century cannot become anything and necessarily lacks character. First of all, this is a clear attack on the culture of the nineteenth century in which intelligent men cannot make anything of themselves but only fools prosper. Second, the Underground Man attempts to point out in himself a fundamental lack of self. He cannot define himself as a scoundrel or as an insect because intelligence precludes the possibility of defining yourself as any one thing. He cannot be spiteful or rude because this would give him character, which intelligent people cannot have.

The view that the protagonist seems to be advancing here is that he cannot give any stable definition of himself. He can do no more than point out certain features of his personality and of his life, thereby attempting to describe rather than define himself. Each of these features, furthermore, may be called into question. In fact, even the simple division between description and definition may itself be called into question. To explain "just who I really am," the Underground Man states: "I'm a collegiate assessor." With this line he attempts to reduce his entire personality to something simple and concrete, but in the very next line explains that the case is not that he actually is a collegiate assessor, but rather that this is something he did so he would be able to eat. The statement "I'm a collegiate assessor," then, is only an attempt to describe himself in terms of something that is peripheral to the core of his being.

The idea that the Underground Man cannot find any features that are central to his personality and thus has no character is also brought into question. He insists, for example, that he could not become spiteful because his personality contradicted spitefulness. He must then have some embedded personality that determines who he is or isn't. Furthermore, while recognizing that staying in Petersburg is rationally inadvisable, the Underground Man insists on staying there but cannot give a reason. Something deeper than reason compels him to remain in the city. He is driven by something that is not rational and cannot be characterized.

At the very beginning of the chapter the Underground Man states that he respects medicine and then continues to say that he is superstitious, or at least superstitious enough to respect medicine. This ironic statement mocks the pretensions of a society that places overly high values on science, reason, and professionalism, all of which are here symbolized by medicine. The implication is that superstition, the opposite of education and reason, is necessary to respect reason. The rational foundation upon which society is built, then, is simply another superstition rather than the absolute truth it is made out to be.

Finally, in the last line, the Underground Man states that he will talk about himself. This statement is already ironic in itself since he has already been talking about himself for quite a while. The statement also explicitly brings Dostoevsky into the tradition started by René Descartes, which attempts to understand the world by focusing on an analysis of the individual self. It is only by thinking about oneself that one can gain any perspective on the rest of the world.

Chapter 2 Summary:

The Underground Man tells us that he could not make anything of himself precisely because he was too conscious. He insists that modern culture provides too much consciousness to human beings and that this overabundance is a disease, while having less consciousness or even none at all is far superior and is also sufficient for everyday needs. He noticed in the past that whenever he was experiencing the most refined cultural feelings, those of the beautiful and the sublime, he would commit the most atrocious acts. His consciousness, recognizing the incompatibility between the feeling and the act, would torture him with shame, from which he derived a secret pleasure.

Here we are told the reason why the Notes are being written: the Underground Man wishes to discover whether his feelings are unique to him or shared by others. Consciousness allows one to recognize that despite extreme shame, one still cannot change. Unchangeable laws from which it is impossible to deviate determine one's nature. If one is a scoundrel, for example, one is a scoundrel because natural law determines that one must be a scoundrel.

The Underground Man tells us that although he is very proud, if he were slapped in the face he would still probably feel pleasure from despair and humiliation. Though he is not guilty of any crimes he has committed because they were determined not by him but by the laws of nature, he is still guilty for them because he is smarter than others around him and can see himself for what he is. He realizes that even if he had a positive trait like magnanimity, he would be unable to make use of it because he would never really be able to forgive. Yet if he had no magnanimity at all and wanted to get revenge for an offense, he would be equally unable to do so. Finally, he promises to explain this inability to act later.

Chapter 2 Analysis:

The main themes of this chapter are those of consciousness and natural law and the complex interplay between these two aspects of human existence. The Underground Man begins saying that even though he wanted to become an insect, he could not achieve this. The insect here is a metaphor for lowness and insignificance. The problem is not simply one of being unable to become anything important, but it is impossible even to become completely insignificant; consciousness prevents one from becoming anything at all.

If consciousness is clearly marked as undesirable, then culture is to blame for the over development of consciousness. This is emphasized by the statement that consciousness is especially developed in "one who has the particular misfortune of living in St. Petersburg, the most abstract and premeditated city in the whole world." St. Petersburg was founded in 1703 by Peter the Great and every step of its development was planned from the very beginning. Peter founded the city in order to make it his capital. Architects were brought in from other European countries, including France and Holland, to give the city a particular look. Streets were planned to be straight, and there was even a failed attempt to dig canals in order to imitate Venice. Most importantly, Petersburg, which was closer to the Russian border than Moscow, could serve as a "window on Europe," a place for cultural exchange. As a result, St. Petersburg was both fully premeditated and highly cultured, both of which traits the Underground Man rails against.

The Underground Man explains that he discovered early in life that he would commit base acts while he was closest to experiencing the "beautiful and sublime," a phrase often used by Russian philosophers of the time and based on the aesthetic philosophies of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant. The conceptual incompatibility of this high emotion with the low acts he committed brought the Underground Man shame, which he came to find pleasure in. This is an explicit attack on the philosophical ideas of Kant and the German Romantic movement, which insisted that an appreciation of the "beautiful and sublime" is related to a greater appreciation for morality. The Underground Man, in contrast, finds that appreciation of beauty has no correspondence with moral action and that, quite to the contrary, he would almost by necessity commit the most immoral acts just as he was appreciating the greatest extent of the sublime. The idea that the shame resulting from immorality could bring pleasure is also an assault on the moral ideas of Enlightenment philosophers like Denis Diderot, who argued that we find pleasure in moral action. Finally, when the Underground Man states that he has set out to write his Notes in order to see if anyone else shares his pleasures of shame and baseness, he is attempting to discover whether the resistance to the dominant moral philosophy of the time is widespread; the implication is that moral theory has little relation to the reality of everyday existence.

Another theme of the chapter is the impossibility of change. We are trapped in the personalities we have been dealt, and to become something else is impossible. If one commits base acts, one commits them as a result of immutable natural laws, and neither morality nor appreciation of the beautiful can change this. Most fascinating is the treatment of consciousness in this chapter. At first, the Underground Man insists simply that an overdeveloped consciousness is a disease and only a quarter of this amount is needed for everyday existence. A little later he goes so far as to say that consciousness itself, no matter in what amount, is a disease; this disease itself is bestowed upon human beings by culture. Dostoevsky makes a fascinating move here, for he rejects philosophical optimism altogether. On the one hand he rejects the Enlightenment belief in the value of culture as a vehicle of reason, progress, and prosperity. Instead, culture spreads a disease; it corrupts us by opening our eyes to our own baseness. On the other hand, Dostoevsky attacks the theories presented by social contract philosophers like John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argue that in the absence of culture and society human beings are pure and naturally tend toward moral action. Dostoevsky's notion here is rather one of a naturally immoral human existence, the exact baseness of which we do not recognize until culture endows us with a consciousness that allows us to see our own moral degradation.

The Underground Man does imply that immorality is not a natural way of being for him. He says that "it was as if this were my most normal condition . . . I almost came to believe (perhaps I really did believe) that this might really have been my normal condition." It is as if baseness is not really his normal condition, but is rather something imposed on him, a disease he has contracted. But at the same time he insists on the impossibility of deviating from his immoral actions and apparent necessity of his baseness. The disease appears to be not the actual immorality, but rather the consciousness of this immorality. This view of consciousness is very similar to the one Friedrich Nietzsche was proposing in Germany around the same time. Nietzsche argued in Beyond Good and Evil that we act based on pre-determined and necessary laws and that some classes oppress others according to the laws of nature. The oppressed fight back by imposing on their oppressors a consciousness that makes them ashamed of their "immoral" acts. The claim that the Underground Man advances in this chapter is very similar. He argues, in effect, that consciousness is a disease because those who have it recognize the baseness of their own actions and experience moral shame. The most important thing to note about this conception is that consciousness is seen as the cause of the problem of immorality. Reading between the lines, however, we see that immorality is grounded in natural law and consciousness merely allows us to recognize the wrongness of our actions.

Finally, the Underground Man illustrates the role of consciousness in his interactions with others. If, for example, someone slapped him, he would take pleasure in the despair of being slapped. He would not, however, be able either to forgive the slap, or to revenge it. Forgiveness is impossible for a man with consciousness because this consciousness allows him to see that his offender acted in accordance with laws of nature, which, the Underground Man adds sarcastically, cannot be forgiven. It makes sense only to forgive human beings; when applied to nature, the notion of forgiveness is nonsensical. Finally, he would be unable to revenge himself because he could never decide to do anything. Consciousness prevents one from acting at the same time as it prevents one from forgiving.

Chapter 3 Summary:

The Underground Man sets out to examine people who are capable of taking revenge. They act spontaneously and are defined, essentially, by their desire for revenge. They rush forward like bulls and can only be stopped by a wall; however, when confronted with this wall, they always give up. For spontaneous "men of action," a wall in their way is soothing because it means that there really is nothing more that can be done. This is contrasted with the thinking person, who would see the wall as an excuse and be extremely grateful for that excuse not to act, even though he does not believe in excuses. The Underground Man insists that he respects spontaneous people and, though they are stupid, feels that this is what normal people are supposed to be like.

Imagining a person with a very acute consciousness, the Underground Man suggests that such an individual, surrounded by unthinking spontaneous men of action, would see himself as a mouse. If he felt himself offended and wanted to take revenge, he would surround himself with so many doubts, hesitations, questions, and anxieties, that he would never be able to carry out the revenge. Instead, he would have to feign contempt and crawl underground. This mouse would then stay in hiding, gathering malice and spite. It would, for forty years, remember every detail of the offence it was given, imagine various scenarios that never happened, and feel shame not only for the actual events but for the imagined ones also. Even if it tries to take revenge, it will do so only in very small ways that will be far more painful to the mouse than to the intended victim. The Underground Man insists that there is a certain pleasure to be had from all this shame, indecision, and impotence, though it is a pleasure that people with strong nerves will not understand. We might, he suggests, expect him to say that no one will understand if they haven't received a slap in the face, but he states that he also has never received a slap in the face.

People with strong nerves‹the bulls‹will always submit to impossibility‹walls. These walls are the laws of nature, under which he includes evolution, proof that one is more interested in oneself than in the rest of humanity, and that two times two is four. People with strong nerves will stop at these laws, since they make up a wall that cannot be broken. The Underground Man, on the other hand, says that though he, too, cannot break the wall, he also will not reconcile himself to it simply because he cannot break it because he hates the laws of nature. While others may be consoled by the impossibilities of the laws of nature, he himself finds greater pleasure in understanding them, in convincing himself that he is to blame for them while realizing that there is no one to blame. In the end, while he knows that there is no one to be angry with for the existence of these laws, it still hurts.

Chapter 3 Analysis:

In this chapter Dostoevsky relies heavily on six important metaphors, which stand for the central concepts in his thinking. These are the bull, the mouse, the underground, the slap in the face, the wall, and two times two. The bull is the man of action, someone who charges without thinking, and the sort of person that the Underground Man consistently claims to respect and believes to be a normal human being. The contrast to this is a mouse, a person who thinks and has an acute consciousness, which robs him of the ability to act. The bull charges while the mouse hides underground. The underground is, of course, one of the novel's central metaphors: it is both a literal place to hide and a figurative place remote from other human beings, their actions, their morality, and their culture, where one may freely indulge in dreams and fantasies unfettered by reality. The slap in the face is a metaphor for an offense of any sort. The mouse, the Underground Man claims, is almost always offended, partially because it can never bring itself to take any action in response to an offence. This is contrary to the bull, which will only stop charging if it encounters a wall. The wall is a metaphor for the impossible: the man of action will stop once he realizes that his revenge cannot be carried out because it is impossible. When something is impossible, this is always due to the laws of nature, such as two times two equals four.

The Underground Man couldn't care less about the fact that two times two is always four; he objects primarily to the laws of nature. The laws of nature, in his mind, are responsible for interfering with every action. The reason that men of action find consolation in the laws of nature is that, when something is impossible, they can stop. The laws of nature are not an excuse for them, but simply fact: you have done all you can, there is nothing more you can do. For the Underground Man, however, the laws of nature are an excuse: you don't have to carry out your action because it is impossible. The problem with excuses is that they only work with regard to other people. No one can possibly expect you to do something that is impossible, or to hold it against you if you fail. The Underground Man, however, sees laws of nature as just an obstacle, simply one that's so hard that it can't be overcome. For him, impossibility doesn't work as an excuse because he can't excuse failing to act to himself regardless of whether or not he would have had to do the impossible to succeed. The reason that the impossible doesn't work as an excuse is that the Underground Man never manages to do anything; he cannot carry out his revenge regardless of whether or not it is possible to do so. If he fails in something that is possible, he blames himself and feels shame and anger at himself. If he fails in something that is impossible, he has no one to be angry with but still feels shame. Since the Underground Man finds pleasure in shame, he is simply trying to make himself feel ashamed of as many things as possible. By refusing to accept the laws of nature as an excuse not to act, he gives himself the choice to feel shame even when he is not responsible for his own failure.

In calling himself a mouse, the Underground Man admits to a character of some sort. Though previously he claimed he could not even become an insect, he now sees himself as at least a mouse. The difference is that the insect is something that he sees as having a defined identity; the mouse, on the other hand, always questions its own identity. He contrasts the mouse specifically with the view of human beings presented by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, using one of his ideas: l'homme de la nature et de la vérité (the man of nature and of truth). For Rousseau, this was the state of the human being before entering into civilization. Civilization, in his view, corrupts the innocence of the true and natural. The Underground Man, of course, flips this idea around entirely by insisting that an honest person that does not take advantage of others must be accumulating a great deal of malice. Dostoevsky sets up a framework for responding to an offence from three different viewpoints. A normal person would simply respond to the offence with revenge. Rousseau's natural man may not take revenge, but would at least feel that punishment for the offender is just. Thus, while he accumulates malice due to not paying back the offence, he at least feels himself justified in wanting revenge. The Underground Man, unlike either of these, believes neither in direct action nor in justice. He is then offended more than anyone else because not only is he never revenged, but he also neither feels the revenge justified nor has a good reason for not carrying it out.

The Underground Man's isolation is important in this chapter. First off, he writes from the underground, a place where he is necessarily removed from contact with others. The underground is a place to escape and hide from the world. The Underground Man understands himself, then, not in relation to others but purely from his own, entirely isolated perspective. Speaking of the conscious individual, he says that "the main thing is that he, he himself, considers himself to be a mouse; nobody asks him to do so, and that's the important point." The point is important because this mouse is a self-invention. The Underground Man has nothing imposed on him except for his consciousness; using that and that alone, he manages to build up a great deal of shame due to inaction and hiding. His isolation is both the cause and the result of his situation. He defines himself as an individual and then‹by virtue of being isolated from normal human responses and actions‹as a disaffected individual.

Chapter 4 Summary:

In response to the possible claim that if he finds pleasure in humiliation he could even find it in a toothache, the Underground Man responds that of course even this is possible. A toothache is a reminder that one cannot beat the laws of nature: your teeth will hurt until nature decides to let them stop hurting. There is no reason for this pain, and there isn't anyone to blame for it, but it is still painful. The consciousness of being powerless to stop this pain and its absolute pointlessness is humiliating. The Underground Man sees this pain as an offence with no offender, and he finds pleasure in it.

If we listen to the moans of a cultured man with a toothache, he suggests, we would find that these moans are not natural ones. Unlike a peasant, an educated man would moan out of spite. He knows that these moans will neither help cure the toothache, nor bring him sympathy since everyone can see that his moans are fake. They do nothing but irritate himself and everyone around him, and they are sustained entirely by spite and malice. The pleasure of humiliation is somewhere there, in the moans, in the feeling of being powerless and despised and humiliated. The Underground Man adds at the end that he does not respect himself because no man of consciousness can respect himself.

Chapter 4 Analysis:

This is a very short chapter that mainly rehashes the previous one using a new metaphor. The toothache is now the metaphor for an offence, and it achieves a slightly different effect than the metaphor of the slap in the face. The slap in the face, while it is always done by another person, is also something inevitable, since as the Underground Man previously pointed out, if someone slaps you it is probably due to the laws of nature. The toothache is a simpler metaphor because in it the pain is not caused by another person, but is directly inflicted by the laws of nature.

The way the Underground Man responds to the toothache is much simpler than his response to the slap in the face. The situation is no longer complicated by the inability to carry out revenge. Using the case of a toothache, the narrator explains that the experience of humiliation does not require the involvement of another person. The spite and malice that bring pleasure from experiencing a toothache are not directed at anyone. They are emotions that spring up simply from an offence and the inability to revenge it; it does not matter whether one does not revenge as a result of doubts and anxieties or simply because there is no one to seek revenge against. The pleasure of spite and malice is something that can be felt in complete isolation; the presence of other people is completely unimportant.

Sarcastically, the narrator ties the moans to progress and European civilization. The moans of an educated person are different from those of a peasant specifically because his education and culture have given him a greater consciousness. This is Dostoevsky's mocking condemnation of progress: the only difference it makes is in adding spite to moans.

Finally, consciousness is once again attacked as something that deprives a person of self- respect. To have consciousness mean to lose self-respect, for consciousness allows one to see oneself as powerless, a slave to the laws of nature, trapped behind the wall of the impossible. Nature forces one to suffer, but nature cannot be beaten. One is powerless to end one's own suffering, and consciousness allows one to see this powerlessness. As a result, self-respect is lost.

Chapter 5 Summary:

The narrator continues his thought from the last chapter by saying that self-respect is impossible for someone who finds pleasure in his own humiliation. He notes, however, that he is not saying this out of repentance, which he hates. As a child, he would often apologize and repent sincerely, even when he was not at fault. He would get into trouble simply because he was bored. In order to live life he had to invent some adventures for himself. He would take offense for no reason and even tried to fall in love once, actually feeling all the accompanying emotions, although he always knew that he was deceiving himself.

As a result of boredom, the Underground Man was finally taken over by inertia, which involves doing nothing. He insists that inertia is the natural consequence of consciousness. Spontaneous men can act only because they mistake secondary causes for primary ones. One cannot act until one is convinced that one's action is right. In the case of revenge, for instance, spontaneous men are convinced that their revenge follows naturally from the cause of justice, and they are then satisfied that they can act. The Underground Man, however, insists that consciousness can see that justice is only a secondary cause.

If one tries to understand the cause of justice, one will see that it is brought about only by other causes and those, in turn, result from other causes, and in the end every cause can be boiled down to the laws of nature, for which there is no one to blame and thus no one to seek revenge against. The Underground Man suggests that spite could replace the primary cause for action because it is not a cause at all, but he can't even believe in spite. Everything consciousness examines can be broken down and disintegrated until one is left only with the laws of nature. There is no primary cause for anything, and so there is never any reason to act; there is nothing to do but to beat the wall. If, to escape boredom, you try to act blindly, carried away by emotion alone, you will soon begin to despise yourself for having deceived yourself in this way.

Finally, the Underground Man says that he has never managed to begin or finish anything in his life, and this is the reason he considers himself intelligent. Even if we suppose he is just a babbler, then we see that babbling endlessly and going around in circles is the only option open to an intelligent person.

Chapter 5 Analysis:

Here the Underground Man further develops the idea of self-invention. Whenever he acted out of strong emotion, this was never an emotion he felt. Instead, it was always simply a way out of boredom. Action is taken not for the sake of reaching a goal, but only for the sake of doing something. We are also told, however, that action can only go on for a short time; eventually it must end to be replaced by inertia. An intelligent person, the Underground Man insists, can never act sincerely, and insincere action can only be sustained for a short period of time.

The result is that the only way to really live is through self-deception. Action is based on a confusion of primary and secondary causes. What this means is that when we act, we need some reason for acting. Such a reason can be provided by love, for example, or justice. If one is moved purely by justice, then one can bring oneself to act, but in order to be able to act, one needs to believe that justice is the primary cause for action. The Underground Man claims that such primary causes are never possible because they can always be broken down to other causes. Ultimately, every action is caused by the laws of nature. When someone has offended us, this was only in accordance with these laws of nature; there can then be no justice in revenge, since the person that revenge is aimed at is not really responsible. Only the laws of nature are responsible, but it is impossible to seek revenge against these laws of nature. Consciousness, by forcing us to examine our motivations, shows that no motivation for action is sufficient and thus keeps us from acting. To act, we have to lie to ourselves, telling ourselves that we do indeed have good reasons for acting.

Here the narrator uses the metaphor of the soap bubble. In order to act, we have to invent reasons for acting and convince ourselves of these reasons, strengthening the motivation to act and blowing it up into a bubble. Sooner or later, however, consciousness kicks in and forces us to realize that these reasons for acting aren't real reasons, they are not causes for acting, and we have just been deceiving ourselves. This is where the bubble bursts and the individual is thrown into inertia imposed by consciousness.

In the last sentence, Dostoevsky makes an oblique reference to What is to Be Done? This novel, written by Nikolai Chernyshevsky, incited Dostoevsky to respond by writing Notes From Underground. The novel, and Dostoevsky's response, is analyzed below (chapter 7) and in the section providing background to the novel.

Chapter 6 Summary:

The narrator has already said that he can never do anything; he continues this thought by stating that it would be wonderful if he did nothing not because of inertia brought on by consciousness, but as a result of simple laziness. If he were simply lazy, he could respect himself: this would give him both a profession and an identity. He mentions the example of a man who prided himself on being a wine connoisseur and as a result respected himself and died with a clean conscience. The Underground Man wishes that he, too, had chosen such a "career" for himself: laziness, gluttony, or anything else by which he could define himself.

He continues to say that he would not be an ordinary glutton or sluggard, but one with an appreciation for the "beautiful and the sublime," which he would proceed to seek out in everything. He cites several examples of bad art, which he would not only appreciate for their qualities of the beautiful and the sublime, but would also gladly drink to. He would grow a triple chin and people would see him and say positive things about him.

Chapter 6 Analysis:

The narrator is here continuing his thread from before. He imagines that it would be much better to have some identity than to have none at all. He is troubled by the realization that as a result of his consciousness, he is unable to become simply lazy. Laziness is a defining feature, something that one can identify with. The Underground Man, on the other hand, cannot define himself in any way. He feels that he lacks an identity as a result of being very cultured. He wants to establish such an identity for himself, but recognizes that this is impossible.

A man who is simply lazy sees himself as just that. On the other hand if a man with overdeveloped consciousness is lazy, he must rationally seek out the origins of his laziness. He cannot accept the laziness itself as a primary cause, but must look for the causes of that laziness. As we have already seen, he cannot find those primary causes. The same would be true of any identity that an individual with an overdeveloped consciousness might take. Whether he is a drunk, a glutton, or a sluggard, he is forced to search for the causes behind his identity and, failing to find them, cannot accept this identity as such. This is why consciousness keeps one from having an identity.

Another important point is that, as we have already seen, what matters is not what the individual "actually" is, but how he sees himself. Someone with a simple consciousness who is lazy might just see himself as lazy, and this is what allows him to have an identity. Someone with an overdeveloped consciousness, on the other hand, cannot accept laziness as his identity. As a result, he is not simply lazy. The two individuals may both appear lazy to others, however what matters to the Underground Man is not how one looks to others, but how one looks to oneself. Identity is for him a personal, not a social, matter.

But this view is paradoxical. The Underground Man does insist that if he actually were a sluggard, he would hear people saying this about him and it would be very pleasant to hear such things. Thus, while identity is a matter of individual psychology, it is also something that needs others to recognize it. The Underground Man does not have an understanding, however, of how others would be able to distinguish between a lazy man and someone with inertia caused by consciousness. He seems to assume, simply, that one's personal identity and social identity are necessarily related, and that the former automatically becomes the latter. The challenge of making one's own individual view of oneself be recognized by others is, however, extremely difficult, and this is one of the central themes of the novel.

The Underground Man is also very sarcastic in this chapter. His idea of a glutton who drinks to everything "beautiful and sublime" is a parody of romantic liberals in Russia, who he feels believed in ideals that they did not in any way apply to reality. This glutton might sit around finding the "beautiful and sublime" in the ugliest painting, and he will drink rather than do anything about the ugliness.

Finally, we should note that the Underground Man continues to place "beautiful and sublime" in quotation marks. At first, it may have seemed like the use of quotation marks was simply meant to illustrate that the phrase is taken from elsewhere. At this point in the novel, however, it appears that he is using the quotation marks for another reason, especially since many ideals are put in quotation marks consistently throughout the novel. This lends the weighty ideals of the time a certain detachment from life, showing ironically that the ideals are not real, not applicable to reality, but simply something that one can believe in and drink to without ever having to act on those beliefs.

Chapter 7 Summary:

The narrator asks who was the first to claim that people do not do what is good only because they are not aware of where their true interests lie. If their true interests were disclosed to them, they would see that it is always in their best interest to do good things and would necessarily do only good deeds since no one acts against their best interest. The Underground Man criticizes whoever voiced such a theory for being overly naïve.

History contradicts the assumption that human beings always act to their greatest advantage. Many have taken great risks and chances despite the fact that their advantage lay in not doing so. It seems that those who proposed the theory base their definition of advantage on scientific formulas. These advantages are: peace, prosperity, freedom, etc. There seems to be, however, another advantage that seems more important than any of these though it doesn't seem to fit into any of these categories.

The Underground Man cites the example of a person who speaks of following natural law and criticizes those who don't see their real advantage, but then does something that seems completely opposed to his interests. It seems that there is some advantage that is even stronger than any of the advantages already named and one that may cause someone to abandon reason so as to gain something even more important. This advantage destroys all the theories created to make human beings happy. In fact, all these theories are just logical exercises. The claim that human beings can be made to act better by telling them their advantages is as silly at Buckle's theory that civilization has made human beings kinder and less likely to wage wars. This theory seems logically correct, but is obviously wrong. Here the Underground Man lists a number of wars taking place at the time he was writing the novel. Civilization has only expanded the range of human sensation so that it is now possible to take pleasure in killing. As a result, while in the past bloodshed was carried out for justice, now it is carried out in a much nastier way.

In response, one may argue that human beings have not yet learned to act according to reason and science. Eventually, however, human beings can be taught to stop opposing their will to their normal interests. Moreover, science will show human beings that they do not have a will of their own; they are like piano keys or organ stops in that their actions are carried out in accordance with the laws of nature and not their own desire. Human action will then be calculated mathematically and classified in dictionaries and tables; since all actions would be reduced to laws of nature, there will no longer be any actions. At this point the answers to all questions will be known and the crystal palace can be built.

The Underground Man responds that such a world will be very rational, but it may be very boring. Since human beings are stupid and ungrateful, someone would probably propose to destroy the whole rational system that provides for happiness. Human beings often oppose their normal interests and advantages and sometimes must do so. This is because what human beings need is not virtuous desire but independent desire. Exercising one's personal will is the advantage that is greater than all other advantages, and it is the reason that systems and theories aimed at improving human existence are always destroyed.

Chapter 7 Analysis:

In this chapter we see the real target of Dostoevsky's polemic in Part I of the novel. Radical liberals of the 1860s were fond of the idea of "rational egoism," expressed by N. G. Chernyshevsky's novel What is to be Done? Chernyshevsky borrowed and developed and idea that had been around at least since Socrates: doing good is always in our interest, and were human beings enlightened as to their true interests, they would always do what is good. The final conclusion is that enlightenment and rationality are necessary for the creation of a utopia.

The narrator ridicules the liberal search for a utopia by arguing that history has shown us that human beings do not always do what is in their best interests. Instead they often risk their lives and search for something different from the simple path of one's own interest. There must then be an urge that opposes all human interests. The Underground Man lists the human advantages usually referred to by the liberals: peace, prosperity, wealth, and freedom. It is clear, however, that human beings have in the past often taken action that seems to go contrary to all these interests. Even if all human advantages were put together in a table of advantages, there would be something that could not be placed into this table because it opposes all the other interests in it.

This one advantage that opposes all other human advantages is free will. If one acts always in accord with reason and towards the achievement of specific goals, then one never has a chance to exercise one's free will. In the utopian ideal, everyone always knows exactly what action they should take that would be in their best interest. There is never a real choice of actions since, given two actions, there is only one that can rationally be taken. In this way, being enlightened as to one's real interests and being rational deprives one of choice. The only way to be really free is to exercise the option that is not rational, to do something contrary to one's own interest. Though it seems like it would be stupid to do something that isn't advantageous, this is the only way that one can exercise one's individuality.

We can usefully contrast this view with that of Immanuel Kant. Roughly, Kant argued that reason is the only thing that can make us free. When we act on our whims alone, we are subject to the laws of nature in the same way that the animals are. In order to be free, we must exercise our reason and thus free ourselves from the laws of nature. The Underground Man's view is exactly the opposite. For him, reason is associated with the laws of nature. The laws of nature determine what actions will lead to the best results, so that by following reason we become enslaved by the laws of nature. The only way to have freedom, then, is to act irrationally and based only on our whim. There are two main differences between Kant's view and Dostoevsky's view. Kant believes that reason frees us from the laws of nature and that freedom also makes us human, since only human beings are rational. Dostoevsky believes that reason enslaves us to the laws of nature and also that freedom means being an individual, able to make a choice at every point instead of having one's actions already decided on ahead of time according to a table of advantages.

The contrast between one's inclination towards freedom and the utopian ideal of reason as the way to a perfect world leads the narrator to refer to the liberal program as a logical exercise. Here the narrator brings up the example of another logical exercise: that of Henry Thomas Buckle, often cited by the liberals. Buckle's claim is that as civilization progresses, human beings become more peaceful. This is a logical exercise because the argument seems perfectly logical, but, when viewed against the facts of real life, turns out to be entirely false. To demonstrate this, the narrator lists a number of current wars: the wars of Napoleon, the American civil war, and a war between Prussia and Denmark in 1864. Less than ten years before this novel was written, Russia had been involved in a three-year war in the Crimea, a fact of which contemporary readers would have been aware. While the argument about the peaceful effects of civilization appears logical, it does not conform to reality.

The same can be said of the liberals' claim that human beings can be taught to act rationally towards their best interests. The argument seems perfectly logical: it seems reasonable to assume that, once told what they need to do to have what is best for them, human beings would act only so as to achieve this. On the surface, this argument appears correct. Let us take a blackjack player, for example. We can tell him that if he folds, he will win; if, on the other hand, he requests another card, he will lose. We can expect that, unless he is insane, the gambler will fold. The liberals assume that all human beings are like this gambler, and thus their argument is perfectly logical. The problem, according to the Underground Man, is that living life is different from simply winning a game. In life, human beings also try to preserve their individuality by exercising their free will. A card game is exciting not because one knows that one will always win, but because one always has to make a decision, take a risk, and exercise one's choice. When told ahead of time what each choice will lead to, the gambler can no longer take the same pleasure in the game.

Two important images are brought up in this chapter, those of the crystal palace and the organ stop. The crystal palace was built for the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 by the architect Sir Joseph Paxton. This palace became a symbol for the liberals, and is referred to by Chernyshevsky in What is to be Done? as a symbol of the perfect utopia where human beings will all live happily by following only their rational interests. The image of the organ stop is taken from Denis Diderot's Conversation of D'Alembert and Diderot. We find a good deal of musical imagery throughout this chapter and the next, serving as a reference to the work of Fourier. The idea of a table of human actions is derived from the same source. Fourier had gone to the trouble of cataloguing, in the form of a table, all the human passions that must be satisfied in a perfect society. The vision of a liberal utopia, taken from Chernyshevsky and Fourier, is exactly what Dostoevsky attacks here. He argues that in such a perfect utopia human beings would be like organ stops: they would have no control over which action to take, since these will have been predetermined for them.

The narrator mentions three challenges to the creation of Chernyshevsky's utopia: free will, boredom, and ungratefulness. The first of these we have already discussed. If told ahead of time exactly what action is in their best interests, human beings would be deprived of their free will. The only way to exercise that free will would then be to oppose their best interests through their actions. Boredom is the second problem, for the narrator suggests that the crystal palace might be very rational, but it would also be very boring. There would really be no new adventures to undertake, since everything that could be done would already be listed in tables of actions. With nothing to do, boredom would grow, and the narrator states that all sorts of things may be thought of out of pure boredom, He mentions the example of Cleopatra, who stuck golden needles into her servants. We remember also the Underground Man's own recollections of taking action and starting new adventures entirely out of boredom. We can understand the problem of boredom by returning to our example of the gambler, above. The gambler plays for the excitement of the game. If he always knew exactly what would happen as a result of his every action, the game would no longer be interesting. He would, in the end, have to make moves he knows will not help him win, if only to make the game slightly more exciting. Finally, it seems that ungratefulness would present a problem. Human beings are extremely ungrateful and, the narrator suggests, even if they were given a social system in which they could be absolutely happy, they would still destroy it out of ungratefulness.

In this chapter we also see the Underground Man continuing to write with reference to someone reading his work. Not only does he make references to the reader, but he also anticipates arguments that the reader might make, responds to them, and sometimes attempts to justify himself or to spite his reader. The presence of the reader has several very important purposes for the novel. First off, it allows the Underground Man to show in his actual writing that human actions cannot be completely predetermined. What is said in the novel is often said unexpectedly and for no reason, maybe just out of spite or in order to exercise the writer's own need for individuality. The presence of a reader also allows the Underground Man to argue with someone rather than simply present his position. Finally, the reader influences what the Underground Man says, forcing him to justify himself and to explain in more detail than would otherwise seem necessary. This last reason for the presence of a reader in the text is important in that it sets up a distinction between the Underground Man's view of himself and the view of him held by someone else, e.g. the reader. This tension between the Underground Man's view of himself and the view of him held by others is a central theme of the novel.

Chapter 8 Summary:

The narrator begins with a possible objection to his reasoning: that desire and free will don't exist because we act in accordance with the laws of nature. The Underground Man says that if one day the natural laws responsible for all human desires are found, then there really would be no more desire; but who would want to desire according to a mathematical table? Once this happens, human beings will no longer be human beings but only organ stops.

To this, one might reply: if science eventually uncovers the natural laws behind our desires, we will no longer have free will regardless of whether we accept the laws of nature or not. If one makes a rude gesture, for example, one will be able to use a table to see that it was impossible not to make that rude gesture at the moment. It will be possible to calculate the actions of one's entire life ahead of time. Also, if people do stupid things only because they don't understand what is in their best interests, they will have to stop doing stupid things once they are shown that reason will guide them to their best advantage. Since reason will always guide us to the best outcome, we will always follow reason instead of desire, and desire will simply cease to exist.

The Underground Man replies that reason can only satisfy one small part of human life. Human beings are constituted with many more characteristics than just reason, and so reason can never satisfy human life as a whole. One may do something that is very stupid, irrational, and contrary to one's advantage, just to have the right to do something stupid: it is an expression of one's individuality and personality. Human beings, even if we imagine them to not be stupid, are still ungrateful, imprudent, and always prone to misbehaving. The Underground Man points out that history is majestic, colorful, and monotonous, but it cannot be said to be rational. There are people who preach reason and enlightened action, but they always betray their own ideals in the end.

The narrator imagines humanity reaching the perfect existence: everyone will have prosperity, peace, and gingerbread and will have nothing to do except eat and sleep. Even then, human beings will do stupid and ungrateful things; they will strive to realize their dreams and fantasies, even if this means risking their gingerbread. People will do stupid things just to prove that they are not piano keys; if they are not given the chance to act stupidly, they will destroy and cause chaos. Even if all these actions were accounted for ahead of time by a table, human beings would go insane in order to lose their reason and be free of this table of reasons.

One may reply: no one is really taking away free will. Instead, the goal is to arrange life so that one will freely choose to will in accordance with reason, arithmetic, and the laws of nature. To this the Underground Man replies that when everything is reduced to two times two makes four, when there is nothing left besides tables, there is no longer any free will.

Chapter 8 Analysis:

In this chapter the narrator mainly rehashes the arguments of the last chapter. In continuing his debate with the imaginary reader, he insists that human beings can never be "enlightened" so that they will always take actions that are for their own best interests. No matter how great a rational world may be, it will deprive human beings of their free will and they will rebel against this even at the risk of losing all the advantages they've gained. As they have always done throughout history, human beings will cause destruction if only to do something that hasn't been planned out ahead of time.

The Underground Man allows for the possibility that even this can be calculated ahead of time. If the table of actions includes this one advantage‹the advantage of exercising one's own individuality‹then it may be possible to compensate for it; it may somehow be possible to channel the desire to act according to one's own free will into some constructive, rather than destructive, activity. The narrator replies, however, that even that won't help. Even if human beings are prevented from wanting destruction, their actions will still be predetermined ahead of time by tables of action calculated according to the laws of nature. Thus, human beings will still be deprived of their free will insofar as all their actions will still be rational. The Underground Man suggests that if it came to this, human beings would intentionally go insane in order not to act rationally. It seems impossible to create a perfectly rational world because human beings will do anything they possibly can to avoid a purely rational existence.

The imaginary reader suggests that a rational utopia would not deprive human beings of free will. It would simply make that free will coincide with one's own normal interests. But even this, the narrator says, is wrong. Free will can never be rationally driven. In the rational utopia, human beings act according to the laws of nature. There is always a predetermined action that they must take to satisfy their normal interests. Free will is excluded from this picture since free will, by definition, involves the ability to choose between actions. When only one action can be chosen, free will no longer exists.

One of the reasons that a rational utopia is not possible is that it will only satisfy the rational side of humanity. Many philosophers, like Kant and John Locke, have expressed the belief that reason is what separates human beings from the animals and is thus our defining feature. According to this view, human beings always can and generally do act rationally. Others, like Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, and later Sigmund Freud, have insisted that other forces are at work within us. Human beings may act on any number of desires or whims, many of which do not conform to reason. The Underground Man thus insists that reason is only a small part of human nature. In addition to reason, human existence also involves "all of life's itches and scratches." This view may not make human life appear particularly appealing, but we cannot ignore the fact that reason does not define the human being. Other urges, which cannot be rationally accounted for, will always exist and will always determine actions.

To illustrate the point, the narrator sarcastically gives a new definition of the human being: "a creature who walks on two legs and is ungrateful." This definition satirizes the traditional Greek definition of the human being. Aristotle's academy defined the human being as a featherless biped (they were unfamiliar with apes, and thus thought that only humans and birds walked on two legs). In response to this definition, the philosopher Diogenes plucked a chicken and claimed that this was another featherless biped. A new definition claimed human beings as rational animals. This concept of the human being as a creature defined by reason was then upheld by philosophers for centuries; it is exactly the definition that the Underground Man is attacking in his monologue. Of course the definition of a human being as ungrateful is not meant to be taken seriously; it is a satire on the original definition of the human being as rational. What is important about this new definition, however, is the presentation of the human being as defined by something that is irrational and, in fact, often opposes reason.

We can note the mention of dreams in this chapter. The narrator claims that human beings will not act rationally because they want to hold on to their dreams regardless of what happens. Even if these dreams are stupid, even if they are entirely out of accord with reality, human beings still insist on holding on to them. The role of dreams and fantasies becomes extremely important in the second part of the novel, where the Underground Man continually has recourse to dreams so as to avoid the facts of his own life.

Finally, we should examine the narrator's utterance in reply to his imagined readers: "Gentlemen, you'll excuse me for all this philosophizingŠ" The narrator always philosophizes. His arguments and his thoughts are always philosophical and rational. Despite his attack on reason, he cannot seem to do without it. In fact, he is far more rational than most human beings, which is precisely what leads him to question so many of the things others take for granted. More importantly, "philosophizing" is as natural to the Underground Man as emotion is to most people. His character in the novel is essentially defined by the fact that he thinks only in philosophical and rational terms. This fusion of philosophy and psychology provides an added attack on the rationalism of the radicals. The Underground Man is someone who lives according to the ideal of these liberals: he rationally examines his actions and his thoughts. The result, however, is far from the positive outcome that the liberals desired.

Chapter 9 Summary:

The narrator begins by saying that he is joking, but quickly goes on to say that he has questions that he wants answered. One such question: why is it necessary to make human beings act according to reason? Why isn't opposing "normal interests" more advantageous? He notes that this is only an assumption made by his opponents; it is a law of logic but not a law of humanity.

The Underground Man agrees that human beings are creative and love to build roads. It seems, however, that building the roads is more important to human beings than making sure the roads actually get somewhere. The most important thing is not to be idle, but to go on building. Yet human beings also have an urge to destroy, and the narrator suggests that this urge occurs because human beings like to build structures, but not to inhabit the structures they build. The built structures may be left behind for domestic animals like sheep, or ants that, unlike human beings, always build the same structure.

Unlike ants, human beings seem to enjoy striving for a goal more than achieving it. The whole goal of human existence may be not reaching the goal but trying to reach it. This process of striving is life. The goal human beings strive for is always two times two equals four, and while searching for it is life, finding it is the beginning of death. While human beings will risk anything to get to the two times two, they are scared of reaching it because afterwards there is nowhere to go. Two times two blocks one's way. The narrator insists that there is nothing special about it: if two times two is four is splendid, then two times two is five is also charming.

The narrator also questions the assumption that the greatest human advantage is well-being. Human beings, he says, often love suffering just as much as well-being and, while he does not believe that either one is better, he believes in the necessity of achieving either one according to one's whim. Human beings will never renounce suffering, chaos, destruction, and doubt. Suffering, he tells us, is the cause of consciousness, and human beings would never give it up. Consciousness is greater than two times two. After two times two, there is nothing left to do at all but sit around in contemplation. Though consciousness may lead to the same outcome, at least one can avoid complete boredom by beating oneself from time to time.

Chapter 9 Analysis:

The narrator says that he is joking, but that perhaps he is gnashing his teeth as he jokes. He then says that he is asking questions that he wants answered. This is a hint that he is not merely attacking the rationalist utopia out of spite. As we have seen, the Underground Man has fully absorbed the ideals of the rationalists. His personal psychology takes reason to the extreme. In his persistent rationality, however, the Underground Man has found no happiness. His questions, then, and his rebellion against the crystal palace, are genuine. He wants to understand how to preserve his humanity within a rationalist framework.

Asking why humanity needs to be brought into the utopian ideal, the narrator states that this may be "a law of logic, but perhaps not a law of humanity." Here we see a problem with reason. We have already seen that it is possible to have logical arguments that fail to accurately reflect reality. What the narrator is suggesting here is that the entire project of the liberals, the goal of creating a utopia, is flawed from the start by the fact that its intentions cannot be justified. The argument used by liberals like Chernyshevsky is logical, but its foundation is questionable. Here is Dostoevsky's attack on logic: logic can only guide us to a conclusion once we have a valid starting point or basic assumption. Logic cannot, however, provide the starting point itself. The starting point must come from an understanding of humanity, something the rationalists lack. The liberals' ideal, then, may work perfectly from a logical point of view, but it does not work in application to real human beings. Logic cannot resolve conflicts between individuals with radically differing starting points.

The road is an important metaphor in this chapter. The road represents building and striving, the things that make up life. The narrator insists that life consists of striving for something, of attempting to achieve a goal, and not of actually achieving it. The utopia that the liberals dream of would eliminate striving entirely. If every action were predetermined and known in advance, there would no longer be anything left to strive for. Such a utopia would be the end of the striving, the end of the road. Human beings strive to better their lives; if, however, they reached a perfect world, there would be nothing left to strive for. Life itself would come to an end since the striving that constitutes life would end also. The Underground Man insists that though human beings always strive for an end they are afraid of finding that end since finding it means an end to the striving. This end, in effect, is death.

We should not be surprised to learn that the goal of human striving, which is also the end of it, is the two times two equals four. This, also referred to as a wall, is the final destination of action and the only thing that can stop it. In discovering the laws of nature, human beings will know everything and will have nothing left to learn. The two times two equals four is here also a metaphor for the perfect utopian society, a society based on the laws of nature, where everyone is happy but has nothing left to do. As we have already seen previously, once one reaches the wall, one can go no further.

In contrast to human beings, the narrator notes ants and domestic animals, such as sheep. Ants always build the same structure, the anthill, and never strive for anything new. The narrator insists that this rebuilding of the same thing over and over again lacks striving and is thus inherently inhuman. Were we to create the perfect utopia, we too would no longer be human. Human beings build structures, which they are happy to abandon for sheep to live in. While human beings must always search for something new, sheep can be content with living in a structure and not building or creating. We see this mention of sheep again in Part II when the Underground Man encounters his old schoolmate Zverkov.

The end of striving‹the perfect world‹leads to idleness. The narrator points out that "idleness is the mother of all vices." He, of course, is perpetually idle, thus making this remark also a sarcastic comment about himself. At the end of Part I, we see the narrator again bemoaning his own idleness.

The Underground Man notes that while two times two equals four is not a bad thing, two times two equals five is also charming. He is not attacking science as something bad; he agrees that science has some value. The narrator's point, rather, is that science and reason should not be allowed to replace other, irrational aspects of humanity. Being human does not just mean being rational, but also being irrational. Two times two equals five is a metaphor for this irrationality, the dreams and fantasies that, in the previous chapter, the narrator insisted humanity would never give up.

The narrator claims that suffering is the cause of consciousness. In the crystal palace, where all actions are predetermined by reason, no one ever needs to make decisions. Where suffering does not exist and human beings do not need to make choices, they also cannot have consciousness. Consciousness appears from the need to make choices and from the exercise of free will. Without suffering there is no freedom, and without freedom there is no consciousness. This argument is similar to those made both by Hegel and Freud. Hegel saw consciousness as being formed from a series of conflicts and oppositions. Unsatisfied with a situation, one attempts to seek a different one in contradiction to the first. In this way consciousness is created. Freud takes a similar stance. At first, he says, human beings have only desires. If these desires go unsatisfied, there is suffering. In order to end suffering and satisfy desire, one must have consciousness. Only consciousness can help us to avoid suffering by helping us to determine how best to satisfy desire, so it is suffering that makes consciousness necessary.

In the crystal palace there is nothing to do. The narrator says that through consciousness one may reach the same point, but at least one can also beat oneself for it. Speaking of this view, he says that, "although it may be reactionary, it's still better than nothing." In fact, this view was seen as extremely reactionary at the time. The liberals' program involved attempting to achieve a perfect utopia. Dostoevsky argues that this it impossible, and that by striving for it one can achieve nothing. His response is reactionary and was seen as such by the liberals who stopped their support for his writing. He insists, however, that though it may be reactionary, his response is the only response that is better than nothing.

Chapter 10 Summary:

The Underground Man suggests that his audience believes in the crystal palace because it is indestructible, something that one cannot stick out one's tongue at. He himself is afraid of it specifically for those reasons: it is something at which it will be impossible to stick out one's tongue. The narrator says that if it were raining and he only saw a chicken coop instead of a mansion, he would crawl into the chicken coop to get out of the rain. However, one can only confuse the chicken coop with a mansion if the only purpose of life is not to get wet.

The narrator goes on to say that avoiding getting we is not the only purpose of life and thus he would prefer to live in a mansion; to convince him otherwise would involve destroying his desire. He states that it does not matter whether the palace is only a figment of his imagination, something that exists only as long as his desires exist. He will not accept a compromise, such as a tenement building, as the goal of his desires. He will follow someone only if his desires and ideals are destroyed and something better is placed before him. If the reader replies that this is too much work, the Underground Man says that this is a discussion and if he can't have the reader's attention, he won't beg for it but will simply retreat into the underground.

The Underground Man says he will not contribute to building the crystal palace even though he rejects it only because it is impossible to stick out one's tongue at it. He says this not because he likes to stick out his tongue, but because he has seen no buildings that he does not want to stick his tongue out at. He would agree to have his tongue cut off if things were arranged so that he would not feel the need to stick out his tongue. He refuses to believe that he was made the way he was simply in order to realize that his way of life is a fraud. Lastly, the Underground Man states that underground men should be controlled, because once they start speaking after forty years of silence, they can't be stopped.

Chapter 10 Analysis:

This chapter was censored, and there are problems with the logic as a result. Important sections were cut out, making the text difficult to understand. The question of why Dostoevsky never attempted to re-insert the original text continues to puzzle critics. Some have argued that it would simply have been too difficult to attempt to get the censors to reverse their decision. Another claim is that Dostoevsky was concerned if this chapter were again fleshed out as the climax of Part I, it would overshadow the climax near the end of Part II. While we do not know the truth behind the omission, we do know from Dostoevsky's letters that this chapter was intended to be the most important part of Part I where he derived from the Underground Man's condition the need for Christ and religion.

Since the text has clearly been cut and suffers as a result from wild jumps in the logic, we need first of all to sketch out what the narrator is actually trying to say. He claims that if he needed to get out of the rain, he would be just as happy to crawl into a chicken coop as into a palace. However, the chicken coop and the palace would only be the same to him if the only purpose of life were to avoid getting wet. One difficulty in interpreting this text is that Dostoevsky uses the terms "palace" and "mansion" interchangeably and that he does not clearly distinguish between the crystal palace and another sort of palace that he is talking about here.

The chicken coop is a metaphor for a structure that satisfies material human needs: it keeps one dry in the rain, but it does nothing more. A palace, on the other hand, should satisfy other, deeper needs. The crystal palace that the liberals advance as the ideal satisfies only material needs, and this is what drives the Underground Man to say that it is only a chicken coop. He claims that the liberals have mistaken the chicken coop for a palace by elevating a structure that satisfies only material needs to the level of an ideal. He argues, however, that it is still a chicken coop and not at all the ideal. The ideal is something else altogether, a different sort of palace. One difference between this new palace and the crystal palace is that the former is based on desire while the latter only on reason. Perhaps the crystal palace exists, since it is based on reason, while the other palace, depending only on desire for its existence, does not. This alone, however, is not enough reason to accept the crystal palace‹the chicken coop‹as the ideal. We can assume that the palace that the Underground Man dreams of would satisfy spiritual desires and also we can assume, from Dostoevsky's letters, that this ideal would be related to Christian teachings.

Accepting the crystal palace as the ideal, the narrator claims, is only a compromise, and it is a compromise he refuses to make. He refuses to believe that the entire purpose of life is to build a world that satisfies only our material, rational needs. There are other needs that must be satisfied, and to accept the crystal palace as the ideal means seeing these other needs as a fraud, something the Underground Man refuses to do.

We also see here that the Underground Man is not satisfied with his underground. He would gladly reject it for something better if something better could be found. When the only other alternative is the crystal palace, however, the narrator prefers his underground. There, at least, he can have his consciousness and his desires. In the crystal palace, where only material needs are of any importance, these things would cease to exist.

Chapter 11 Summary:

The Underground Man says that in the end, the underground is better. Conscious inertia is better than the way an ordinary man lives, even though the narrator envies the ordinary man. However, the narrator concedes that what is better is not the underground, but something different that he will never be able to reach. It would, he says, be better if he believed anything he wrote. He does believe it, but he also has the feeling that he has been lying the whole time.

He then lets his imagined reader attack him, listing all of his paradoxes: He is impudent, but makes apologies; he claims to be afraid of nothing, but seeks his reader's favor; he knows his jokes aren't funny, but he appreciates their literary style. He brags about his consciousness, but this consciousness is not full because his heart is depraved. The Underground Man replies that he has himself invented all these words. He has been listening to others speak through a crack for forty years, and since those were the only words that occurred to him, he invented them.

The narrator notes that he will not let anyone read what he has written. He questions why he keeps calling his readers "gentlemen" when he has no intention of having any readers. He has a different reason for writing. Everyone, he says, has secrets that he will not reveal to anyone, and decent men have more of these secrets than others. Recently, he himself had decided to write down some of his experiences. He notes that a faithful autobiography is impossible and that Rousseau lied in his Confessions out of vanity; vanity can make one invent the worst crimes for oneself.

Contrary to Rousseau, the Underground Man states that he will not have any readers; he does not want to be burdened with editing chores, and he writes only with the intention of putting down whatever comes to his mind without worrying about what others will think. This raises the question of why he goes to so much trouble to apologize, to justify himself, to keep explaining his points. The Underground Man cannot answer this question with certainty. There are many possible reasons. Maybe he is just a coward, or maybe he is better behaved when he is imagining an audience reading him. But then the Underground Man asks himself why he needs to write at all instead of recalling it in his head. He proposes, first off, that his style will be better if his confessions are written on paper, and that they look more dignified that way. Also, he has memories that won't leave him alone, and writing them down may be the only way to purge them. The last reason is that he is bored and idle. Writing feels like work, and perhaps he can become good and honest through work.

Finally, the Underground Man leads the way into Part II as he notes that it has been snowing for a while, and this snow is what reminded him of the incident he is to recall. The snow is yellow and wet, so his recollection will be with regard to wet snow: "Apropos of Wet Snow."

Chapter 11 Analysis:

The narrator says that though he envies the normal man, he would never trade places with him. Again he reaffirms his commitment to the underground. There is something better, but until it is found, the underground is still better than any other existence. In the underground at least one can keep one's consciousness, and while consciousness may be a disease, it is still better than nothing. This claim is similar to John Stuart Mill's argument that it is better to be a dissatisfied Socrates than a satisfied fool. Despite being unsatisfied, no one would choose to give up his consciousness in exchange for a higher level of satisfaction.

We constantly see the narrator attempting to justify himself in this chapter. At the same time, however, he pretends not to be doing this. In this we find an expression of the conflict we have already seen. The Underground Man wants to be completely egoistical and not to care about anyone but himself. He wants to live in his own personal fantasy world, regardless of what others think of him. At the same time, however, he cannot get away from the desire to make himself understood and admired by others. In attempting to explain why he decided to write down his thoughts, for example, he suggests that these thoughts look more dignified on paper. The Underground Man is, then, concerned with dignity and with how his thoughts will appear. The tension between the Underground Man's individualism and his reliance on the approval of others has so far been expressed only in his attempt to write the monologue as a dialogue, to address himself directly to a reader and engage this imaginary reader in conversation. In Part II, this tension between the self and the others will take a much more central place.

There is a little more to this tension, however. Some of the objections that the Underground Man poses to his own philosophizing are attributed to an imaginary reader. Others, however, are objections that he poses himself. Moreover, even those objections that he attributes to others are still objections that he himself has invented. The Underground Man's personality is conflicted. Earlier, he has claimed that an individual with consciousness can never have an identity. Here we see this claim played out. The narrator is incapable of expressing an idea with conviction. He must always question it, either from his own point of view or from someone else's. Consciousness always questions itself and can never reach a stable position.

This chapter also contains a direct reference to Rousseau. Rousseau is often credited with inventing a language to describe the individual self in his Confessions. In that book, Rousseau attempted to set down his own self as accurately as possible so that others might judge him. The Underground Man, on the other hand, insists that his own "confessions" will never be read and that things such as these are not written for other people. Rousseau's Confessions clearly serve as a model for this novel. Dostoevsky had originally conceived of the novel as a "confessions," but later gave up the project, as it would have been too long.

The Underground Man insists that when writing for others, one inadvertently lies out of vanity. He thus attacks Rousseau in agreeing with Heine's claim that Rousseau certainly must have lied in his own Confessions. The narrator's view of vanity here is interesting. Common sense would suggest that in writing an autobiography one would tend towards suppressing information about one's crimes. The Underground Man, on the other hand, insists that vanity has the opposite effect. He believes that Rousseau actually invented extra crimes for himself and that autobiographers, in general, tend to lie more to degrade themselves than to make themselves seem perfect moral human beings. These crimes become idealized, and the personality that emerges through them is greater than the one that actually lived.

Near the end the Underground Man says that writing these Notes feels like work and that work makes one good and honest, so that at least there is a chance for him. At first this appears entirely sarcastic, as if the Underground Man is ridiculing the whole idea that one can become honest through work. In conjunction with the rest of Part I, however, we can see that this is not what he means. We have already seen, for example, that the Underground Man believes idleness to be the mother of all vices. Avoiding idleness by working, then, seems to be a way out of vice. Furthermore, idleness leads to boredom, which the narrator has repeatedly presented as a negative force leading human beings to destruction. Work, a constructive activity, seems preferable to the destructiveness brought on by boredom.

Finally, the narrator leads us into Part II by a recollection brought on by wet snow. Unlike the usual conception of snow‹white and cleansing‹the Underground Man sees a dull, yellow, and wet snow outside. This snow, so unlike pure white snow, is a symbol of corruption, representing both the Underground Man's own depravity and the cultural corruption of the city of St. Petersburg. Wet snow was an image often used by the realist writers of the Naturalist School in St. Petersburg. The reference to this wet snow thus helps to recall the mood of the 1840s, the time period when Part II is set.

Part II:

Chapter 1 Summary:

The chapter opens with a poem by N. A. Nekrasov about a man redeeming a fallen woman. In the poem, the man saves the fallen soul and she curses her situation and tells him about her past. Then she covers her face in shame.

The Underground Man then begins his recollections from when he was twenty-four years old. He was extremely solitary and his coworkers loathed him. The narrator wonders why other people, regardless of how repulsive they are, never think that anyone loathes them. Since the Underground Man regarded himself with loathing, he assumed that everyone else did, too. He found his face repulsive, but wanted it to be noble and intelligent.

The Underground Man hated his colleagues in the office, and when he despised them he would sometimes think them to be superior to him. He found that he could never make eye contact with any of them and was afraid of anything unconventional. The others were sheep, and he was the only one in the office who considered himself a coward and a slave. He is not embarrassed by this, since he claims that all decent men always must be cowards and slaves. He would also notice that he was completely alone and unlike everyone else. The narrator notes that from all this it is obvious that he was still young then. Sometimes the Underground Man had to leave work early because he found being there so repulsive. At other times, however, he would laugh at his own romanticism and caprice (which he thought might come entirely out of books) and proceed to befriend his coworkers.

The narrator digresses to speak of Russian romantics. He insists that unlike German or French romantics, who believe in transcendence and are thus unconcerned with real world events, Russian romantics have a stronger sense of reality than anyone else. They are always capable of being diplomatic, would never leave a job unless they had another one lined up, and reach their goals at all costs while always preserving the "beautiful and sublime" and never losing their ideals. These romantics never actually do anything out of their ideals, but they still retain them, so they manage to be scoundrels while being completely honest.

Continuing his narrative, the Underground Man recalls that he did not maintain any of his friendships. He would quarrel with the others and then even refuse to greet them. Usually, he was alone. He wanted to control himself by filling himself with external sensations, but had absolutely nothing to do besides reading books. He still wanted to be active, but had nothing to do and as a result became depraved. The narrator notes that he has said this to justify himself, and he is noting that because he does not want to lie.

The Underground Man went to all sorts of sordid places in an effort to amuse himself. Once he saw a man being thrown out of the window of a tavern and stepped in hoping that someone would throw him out of the window as well. The moment he stepped in, however, an officer moved him out of the way and walked past, failing to notice him. The narrator believes that this refusal to notice him was much worse than a beating. He wanted a real quarrel, a literary quarrel, but he had simply been ignored. He could not protest because he was certain that the officer would refuse a duel with him and everyone in the tavern would laugh at him if he attempted to protest, since he would be forced to use literary, and not common, speech. He can't speak about something like a point of honor without using literary language, especially since a "point of honor" can't even be referred to in normal speech.

The Underground Man continued to run into the officer on the street and observe him for two years. He uncovered everything he could about this officer from his doorman. He wrote a short sketch about the officer, but this was never published. He then composed a letter insisting that the officer apologize or challenge him to a duel, but decided not to send it. Finally, the Underground Man came up with an idea. He strolled down Nevsky Prospect daily, where he was constantly shoved aside by other pedestrians. He was certain that he looked ridiculous because he was scurrying from side to side and was very poorly dressed. He knew that society saw him as a fly, and this is what he was, despite his being smarter and more cultured than the others. The humiliation of these strolls began to cause him pleasure.

The officer often strolled down Nevsky Prospect. He would turn aside before generals and important dignitaries, but with everyone else he would just walk straight toward them and force them to step aside. The Underground Man, too, always stepped aside, and then began questioning this. When two equals meet, they should both move half-way to the side to let each other pass. He thus decided to bump into the officer instead of setting aside. Imagining that such an incident could occasion a public scandal, the Underground Man decided that he should be well dressed so as to look better in the eyes of society, as if he and the officer actually were equals. He took his salary in advance and bought new gloves and hat. Then he borrowed money from his office chief, Anton Antonych, to buy a beaver collar in place of the raccoon collar he had at the time. After this, he tried repeatedly to collide with the officer, but always lost his nerve and stepped aside at the last moment, one time even falling to the ground. Finally he managed to bump into the officer and felt himself fully avenged. The narrator is convinced that, even though the officer acted as if he hadn't noticed the collision, he really had. A few days later the Underground Man would begin to regret his act of revenge and the officer was soon transferred out of Petersburg.

Chapter 1 Analysis:

We have already seen that the title of Part II, "Apropos of Wet Snow," brings up associations with the Naturalist School. It is important to note also that Part II is written in the naturalist style, presenting the Underground Man, other characters, and places as realistically as possible in all their squalor. This realism is the sort of writing for which Dostoevsky was admired among the radicals. Unlike Part I, which focused entirely on the narrator's personal psychology, Part II deals with the actual events of his life. First, this allows us to see the way that the Underground Man's rather unique psychology is played out in reality. Second, since in Part II the narrator is presented as a part of society, the conflict we have seen earlier‹the tension between the narrator's image of himself and the image others have of him‹is brought to the forefront. Part I, with its emphasis on personal psychology and philosophy, was best suited to an attack on the philosophical ideas of the 1860s liberals. Part II, dealing with people and events, is aimed at ridiculing the attitude of the romantic liberals of the 1840s. The writing here is far more autobiographical, since Dostoevsky himself belonged to this group prior to his imprisonment.

In this chapter we see a long attack on the Russian romantics. The narrator accuses them of being too involved in literary matters. They live life as practically as the most materialistic bankers, but they also hold their romantic ideals. The romantics, then, fantasize a good deal but actually do very little about it. The Underground Man's character serves to demonstrate this as he fantasizes constantly throughout Part II, but has no idea how to carry through his fantasies.

The poem that opens Part II was written by Nikolai Nekrasov. Written in 1845, the poem is imbued with the spirit of the Œ40s. The poem focuses on the redemption of a prostitute, a theme very common to the writings of the liberal romantics of the time. Part II will serve to demonstrate the absurdity and falsity of this idea.

In the office, the Underground Man tells us, "I retreated further and further into my corner." The corner is only one of a series of metaphors in the novel. Other important ones are the wall, the mansion, the chicken coop, the crystal palace, and the underground. The importance of buildings is that they can both isolate one from the external world and also keep one in a private world of fantasy. Like the underground, the corner is a place where one can be alone from others. Unlike the underground, however, the corner offers a sort of false protection. One is only safe on two sides. On the others two sides one is still clearly visible to others. This is the Underground Man's problem. He cannot fully retreat, because he still sees others and is still seen by them. He can never exist entirely in his own private world, but is forced to interact with others and to see himself through their eyes.

The Underground Man has a strong concern with his face. He finds it repulsive, assuming that everyone else must also find it so. He wants it to appear intelligent, however. The face, of course, is what one uses to interact with the world. It contains the mouth and the eyes, both of which are, for the Underground Man, cut off. He cannot speak to the others. He also notes that he could never withstand anyone's gaze. He would always look away, his eyes failing against others' eyes. Though his face does not communicate directly, however, it is still seen. The Underground Man, believing in his own superiority to others, wants them to be able to see this superiority in his face. He cannot retreat into a world of fantasy completely, since he is rooted always in reality by the way his face looks. He needs it to look intelligent because he wants others to see how intelligent he is. Fantasy plays an important role here, as well. Though the Underground Man is concerned with how others see him, he mostly imagines their responses to his appearance. Whether his face looks noble or intelligent to others is neither known to him nor important. What is important is whether he, looking in the mirror, believes it to look noble or intelligent. He attempts to create a specific image for himself, to define himself. As in Part I, however, this self-definition is aimed at establishing a positive image of oneself in the eyes of others.

The narrator refers to others in his office as sheep. We have already seen sheep mentioned in Part I, as animals for which humanity may build and abandon structures. There seems to be a division among human beings. On one hand there are those who are sheep and resemble other sheep. On the other hand there are superior human beings like the Underground Man. The problem is that sheep are under no obligation to recognize the superiority of the others. While the Underground Man may fantasize that he is superior, no one else recognizes this. He is then humiliated because his superiority remains unknown to anyone but himself. In order to truly feel superior, he must force others to recognize his own superiority. Since he cannot do this, his feeling of superiority is always laced with a feeling of inferiority. He is subservient to the others because it is they that decide whether or not he is superior.

It is interesting to note, also, that the narrator feels he is superior because he is a coward and a slave. He is inferior to others, and this inferiority is the cause of his superiority. One cannot come without the others. A negative and a positive trait are linked together here, and the Underground Man explains that it could never be otherwise. Superiority, then, is not linked to inferiority in his case alone, but in all cases.

The Underground Man notes that he sometimes lost his fastidiousness. He suggests that perhaps he never had any at all, and it was all borrowed from books. Here we have again the intersection of fantasy and reality. His fastidiousness manifests itself as something real, and it actively affects the way he interacts with others. However, he admits that perhaps this real feature of his personality isn't real at all. It may simple be an invention that is taken from the fantasy world of books. Throughout Part II, the narrator finds it extremely difficult to determine the difference between the real and the imaginary. He confuses reality with literature constantly, accusing the former of not being similar enough to the latter.

The narrator explains that his nastiness comes in large part from reading a lot and having nothing to do. He then states that he says this to justify himself. It seems, then, that the narrator is lying to justify himself. But he is attempting to justify his nastiness, to explain that he really isn't that bad a person. In the previous chapter the narrator was accusing autobiographers of making up crimes for themselves out of vanity. He, on the other hand, does the exact opposite, attempting to justify his crimes rather than make up new ones.

The second half of the chapter, relating the story of the officer, demonstrates how deeply the Underground Man is trapped in the world of fantasy. He goes into the tavern looking for a literary quarrel. He wants to be thrown out of a window because that would be very picturesque and romantic. What he gets, however, is not a literary quarrel but a simple shove to the side. He is completely ignored. This is something that isn't literary, something that never happens in books or fantasies. The Underground Man is insulted by this precisely because it isn't literary. The gesture of moving someone out of the way is too real, too banal, and too far removed from the world of books. It is this that the Underground Man cannot forgive. He spends the next two years plotting a literary revenge.

We also see that the Underground Man has no way of expressing himself to real people. He wants to complain about having been shoved aside, but realizes that he cannot do so without using overly literary terms. In fact, the term "point of honor" itself is a literary term that cannot be used in an ordinary setting. The Underground Man, however, insists on seen his "quarrel" with the officer in literary terms. His way of seeing the world is something he cannot explain to others, since he sees the world in terms that do not exist in everyday conversation. Honor (like the Underground Man's fastidiousness) is something that does not exist in reality but is invented through books.

Finally, we must note that the Underground Man is concerned throughout to make the officer recognize his existence. The officer becomes a subject of hatred for him specifically because he walks around ignoring people. The Underground Man cannot handle being ignored. He needs to make the encounter with the officer into something unreal, something literary. As a result he lays out the most literary plans, carefully plotted. Whether or not the plan succeeds, however, depends entirely on whether or not the officer notices him. If the officer still ignores him after bumping into him, then the Underground Man has failed and the quarrel is still not a literary one. He thus chooses to believe in the literary fantasy world, insisting, though this is highly unlikely, that the officer did indeed notice him.

The narrator also cannot accept the rules of the real world. In reality, one's appearance and position are highly important. Officers decide whom to yield the way to based on their uniforms and not on their inherent "moral superiority." The Underground Man seems to understand this, which is why he borrows money to dress himself better for the quarrel. He wants to be dressed well enough for his encounter with the officer to appear, superficially, as an encounter of equals. On the other hand, however, the Underground Man does not understand that, though he may feel superior to everyone else, no one will recognize his superiority so long as he is poor. This is not only a detail about the Underground Man's psychology, but is also a criticism of the mores of the time. Society was materialistic, deciding the value of people based on their status and not on what's inside of them. This is something that the Underground Man cannot accept and rebels against.

Chapter 2 Summary:

The narrator recounts that after his episode with the officer he felt remorse, but soon learned to accept it and sank into dreams. In his dreams he would see himself as a hero and experience happiness, feeling these dreams to be entirely sincere. He believed that, since he was a hero, he could sink to any depths of corruption because a hero is never fully corrupted; only the common people are corrupted by debauchery. Since he could not stand to be common, the Underground Man sank to the lowest depths while believing that he was actually higher than everyone else. His vices provided him with the added pleasures of suffering and overly conscious self-analysis.

The Underground Man had dreams that were "beautiful and sublime," experiencing so much love in them that he did not even feel the need to direct that love at anyone or anything real. These dreams were very literary, based on episodes from books. In them, the Underground Man would always be above everyone else, and the rest would grovel at his feet. He imagines his reader saying that this is all repugnant, and attempts to justify himself, but then agrees that it really is repugnant and his self-justification is even more so. In his dreams the Underground Man would sometimes feel such love, such a strong urge to embrace all of humanity, that he sometimes needed to talk to at least one other person. He would visit his office chief, Anton Antonych, who only received guests on Tuesdays, so that the Underground Man was forced to control his impulse to embrace humanity to make it wait until Tuesday. He would go to his chief's apartment, which was very frugal and small, and sit while listening to one of his host's other guests speaking about commonplaces. Entirely unable to communicate with others, the Underground Man would return home having put off his desire to embrace humanity.

Desiring to visit someone on a day that was not Tuesday, the Underground Man went to visit Simonov. Simonov was an old classmate of his and, since the Underground Man hated most of his classmates (so much, in fact, that he changed his job only to get away from them), one of the very few whom the narrator would still greet on the street. Not certain whether Simonov actually found him repulsive, the narrator went to see him for the first time in almost a year.

Chapter 2 Analysis:

The Underground Man is very candid concerning his retreat into fantasy. He notes that as he found himself less and less capable of dealing with reality, he would retreat more and more into dreams of the "beautiful and sublime." He is here again attacking the romantics, in fact showing that their beliefs are only an escape from reality. The attack on the romantics continues as the Underground Man explains that he would often dream of love but without being compelled to actually do anything about it. He would feel so much pleasure in his dreams, that it would be entirely unnecessary for him to emerge from those dreams. The Underground Man values love greatly, but not as an emotion that he can actually feel. Rather, love is a concept that appears in his dreams and makes him feel better, much like the "beautiful and sublime." To direct that love and actually to feel it for another person, however, is well out of his means. Not only does he not know how to feel it, he believes this also to be unimportant. Dostoevsky is attempting here to show that the romantics, despite believing in the most honorable things, never manage to actually defend these. It is not enough to believe in something; one must also act on that belief.

Dostoevsky's sarcasm continues, however. At times, the Underground Man does actually feel compelled to do something about his dreams. He wants, occasionally, to embrace all of humanity. Since he cannot do this, he decides to attempt to socialize with at least one other person. Through that one person he wants to embrace humanity as a whole. Again, what we see is a criticism of the romantics. Like the Underground Man, if they ever act on their ideals, they act on them in the most simplistic way and one that does nothing to actually uphold the ideals.

In Anton Antonych's apartment, the Underground Man listens to a number of civil servants talking about their work and about success. The Underground Man not only doesn't say anything, but actually cannot say anything and has no idea at all of what he could possibly way. These conversations are real, not literary. The Underground Man knows only how to talk to characters from novels; when real people are involved, he falters. Listening to conversations and being unable to participate in them, the Underground Man decides to postpone his desire to embrace humanity. That desire is not really something he feels urgently, but only as an aspect of his egoistical dreams. Realizing that he cannot carry out his embracing of all humanity, the Underground Man backs off completely, abandoning his dream of embracing humanity. The emergence from the fantasy world to the real world is impossible for the Underground Man. He is so entrenched in the literary world that he cannot communicate enough with others, or find them interesting enough, to ever actually speak to them. By being trapped in the literary world, the Underground Man succeeds in separating himself even more from reality.

Chapter 3 Summary:

Coming into Simonov's apartment, the Underground Man found two more of his former classmates there: Ferfichkin and Trudolyubov. They ignored him completely. Though the narrator says he understood that they must look down on him for his professional failure and his poor clothes, he was surprised that they treated him as something utterly insignificant, like a house fly. They school chums were discussing plans for a farewell dinner to Zverkov, another old schoolmate of theirs, who was an officer and about to leave on assignment. The Underground Man hated Zverkov in school because he was attractive and lively and everyone else loved him. Zverkov was rich and bragged about it. He would brag also about his future duels and the women he would conquer, and everyone adored his stories. The narrator notes that he would gladly have exchanged his own ugly intelligent face for Zverkov's attractive stupid one, even though he hated Zverkov's face. At times Zverkov and the Underground Man had quarreled in school, but only the latter actually felt these quarrels. Zverkov was unperturbed. When Zverkov came a little closer to the narrator as they were graduating, the narrator was actually flattered, despite being filled with spite. The narrator notes that his classmates must have kept in touch with Zverkov even though they considered themselves inferior to him.

The Underground Man quickly proceeds to invite himself to Zverkov's farewell party. The others do not want him there and protest, claiming that he never got along with Zverkov and that this is really a private occasion for friends. In the end, however, they can't stop him from coming. Later, the Underground Man realizes that he doesn't want to go because he hates Zverkov and because he doesn't actually have the money he needs to contribute for the dinner. He realizes, however, that he is bound to go since it would be completely tactless to do so and he always does the most tactless thing. He decides to save money by not paying his servant.

The narrator goes home and is tormented by nightmares, remembering his years in school. He was sent there by distant relatives, and could not get along with his fellow students because he was not like them. They teased him and he took refuge in his pride. They made fun of his face, but he insists that they all had stupid faces and that even boys who were attractive when they got to the school soon took on an excessively stupid appearance. His schoolmates had no interest in important subjects and knew nothing about life. They were interested only in success and confused it with intelligence. The Underground Man hated his peers and they hated him. He was interested in humiliating them, so he began to study and performed much better in school than they did, reading books that they could not understand. The narrator insists that while his peers hated him for this, they also submitted morally. Lonely, the Underground Man had attempted to befriend some of his schoolmates, but this was usually a failure. He had one friend, but dominated him entirely and began to despise him as soon as he had dominated him. Having finished school, the Underground Man had instantly quit his special job in the civil service so as to break ties with his past.

Having woken up the morning of the dinner, the narrator was certain that a radical change in his life would occur that day. He came home early from work and polished his boots for the second time that day. His servant refused to do this, and the Underground Man went to special trouble to polish the shoes so that his servant wouldn't notice and despise him for it. He worried that his clothes were in poor shape and that the others would despise him for this. The narrator was aware that he was exaggerating the importance of all these things, and he was concerned that the dinner would be an encounter that was common and not literary. He claims that there is not time for thought because reality was looming. He wanted not to go, but knew that he would then reproach himself for having run from reality. He wants to prove to the others that he is not the coward he thinks he is. Finally, he began to dream that he would subjugate everyone and make them love him, aware at the same time that he did not need to subjugate them and didn't want them to love him.

Chapter 3 Analysis:

When he walks into Simonov's apartment, the Underground Man notices that the others ignore him as if he were a fly. In Chapter 1 of Part II, the narrator notes that, walking along the Nevsky Prospect, he is a "fly in the eyes of society." The image of the fly differs from that of a mouse, an image used in Part I, in that the mouse is the image that the narrator assigns to himself, while the fly is the image he feels others assign to him. This distinction also underscores one of the main differences between the two parts of the novel. The first part presents the narrator in isolation, while the second finds him interacting with other people. Both the mouse and the fly are small, insignificant, and repulsive. The mouse, however, is something that runs away and hides. The fly, on the other hand, is simply ignored. The image of the mouse, then, serves to bring out the fact that the Underground Man is a person who isolates himself because he is afraid of others. The image of the fly shows the Underground Man as someone who, no matter what he does, is entirely ignored by the rest of society.

It seems worthwhile to look at some of the names that appear in this chapter. The name Ferfichkin, while it does not actually mean anything, evokes the image of something small and unpleasant, like a rodent. The name Trudolyubov, in Russian, means a lover of work. The narrator's subsequent insults aimed at Trudolyubov seem to cast doubt on the ideal of labor. Zverkov, finally, is clearly derived from the Russian word zver', which means "animal." The name reminds us of the narrator's references to animals throughout the novel as creatures inferior to human beings.

Deciding whether or not to attend the dinner party, the Underground Man realizes that he will go because he will do anything that is tactless and indecent. The Underground Man does such things, of course, out of spite. He knows that the others do not want him to attend. He knows also that he himself has no desire to attend. As a result, he wants to attend even more, just so as to do something that will spoil the day for everyone. This decision to attend the dinner party follows the patter of the toothache that the narrator had described in Part I. A cultured man with a toothache, according to him, will moan simply to spite himself and others. The Underground Man decides to attend the dinner party for the same reason.

We should note also the repetition of a common theme in this chapter: the Underground Man's extreme concern with others' opinions of him. He carefully goes through his clothes and reproaches himself for being too slovenly to have anything decent to wear. He goes so far as to polish his boots for the second time in one day, a very difficult procedure considering that he has to do this without his servant noticing. We have already seen this preoccupation with appearance in chapter 1 of Part II, as the Underground Man prepares himself to confront the officer.

Though the Underground Man is convinced that he is morally superior to other human beings, he wants them to view him as an equal based on his clothes rather than his intellect. At the same time, however, he despises anyone who judges people based on their external appearance and the clothes they wear. This tension is present throughout the novel, as the Underground Man believes both that one makes oneself what one is (the mouse sees itself as a mouse) and that what one is depends on others (society sees him as a fly). This apparent contradiction‹the Underground Man's belief that he should not be judged by his external appearance coupled with an excessive obsession with his appearance‹is more than simple hypocrisy.

While the Underground Man desperately wants to be able to define himself in isolation from what others think of him, he is never able to achieve this. He believes, in fact, that certain of his beliefs about himself can be reversed only by external events. The Underground Man says, for example, that if he did not go to the party he would be a coward and would reproach himself for the rest of his life, claiming that he "retreated before reality." Instead of fleeing society and defining himself in isolation, the Underground Man wants to define himself through others' opinions of him. He says: "I desperately wanted to prove to all this Œrabble' that I really wasn't the coward I imagined myself to be." In isolation, the Underground Man sees himself as a coward. His negative belief about himself can change only if others believe that he is not a coward. We have already seen hints of this idea earlier in the novel: the Underground Man's opinion of himself depends on others' opinions of him.

As an aside, we may observe that the narrator presents us with an important distinction between two different kinds of external appearance: one's face and one's clothes. One's face, as a part of one's physical body, is supposed to express who one is inside. Thus the Underground Man is concerned in chapter 1 (Part II) to make his face appear intelligent and noble. In this chapter he recalls that the students in his school all had stupid faces. The Underground Man also notes, however, that he would gladly have exchanged his intelligent repulsive face for Zverkov's stupid handsome one. The difference between these two faces is that the Underground Man's face is important for something internal: its intelligence. Zverkov's face is handsome, and its importance lies in its externality. Besides faces, clothes also play an important role in the narrative. Clothing, throughout the novel, symbolizes success. Dressing well is the only way that the Underground Man can make himself equal to the officer; most importantly, he does not think the clothes will make him look equal to the officer, but will actually make him equal. Clothes seem to stand in for success: anyone well dressed is considered successful. Anyone poorly dressed is considered unsuccessful. One's status in society thus depends on the clothes one wears. The Underground Man has a problem: he has neither a handsome face nor good clothes. His efforts at making himself externally equal to others fail, and he is forced to resort to other means, primarily to insisting on his moral superiority and his overdeveloped consciousness.

We finally come to one of the Underground Man's most important features not yet seen in the novel: his need to dominate others. Hegel, in his famous "master/slave dialectic," argued that human beings define themselves by dominating other human beings. In order to have self-consciousness, one needs to have one's self validated by another, something that is achieved by dominating the other. This is what the Underground Man is really after. He cannot define himself in isolation. He needs the approval of others not only to help him define himself, but also to disprove his negative beliefs about himself. He can see only one way of doing this: to force others into believing him to be superior.

Recalling his years in school, the narrator mentions that when others hated him, he decided that he wanted their humiliation rather than their affection. He studied hard and earned better grades than they did only in order to dominate them. As a result, he claims that they "submitted morally." This submission is really the only thing that the Underground Man seeks in his relationships. He remembers his only friend in school. He dominated this friend and finally attained his complete subjugation, only to abandon him. The Underground Man is interested only in dominating and subjugating others. He needs them to acknowledge his superiority since this is the only way that he can define himself. The fact that the Underground Man is unable to dominate everyone is yet another reason why he is unable to ever fully define himself.

Finally, this chapter deals with the Underground Man's struggle to reconcile the real world with the world of thought, fantasy, and dreams. "This isn't the time for thinking. Reality is now looming," the Underground Man says at one point. In his world of fantasy, the Underground Man imagines he will subjugate Zverkov and force his friendship on him. In reality, of course, this can never happen. The Underground Man's need to dominate others can be fulfilled only in fantasy; in reality he can never achieve his desires.

Chapter 4 Summary:

The Underground Man arrived at the restaurant for dinner. He had expected to be the first there, but it turned out that he was an hour early as the others had changed the time from five to six and failed to tell him. When he arrived, the table was not set yet, and he had to wait as the waiters set it and brought in the candles. He found this humiliating, and was also disgusted by the noise coming from other rooms where people were shouting and squealing.

Finally the others arrived. Zverkov treated the Underground Man with extreme condescension and the Underground Man wondered whether Zverkov now thought himself to be immeasurably superior to him. Simonov said that he could not tell the narrator that they had changed the time because he didn't know his address. He did not, however, apologize. The others were partly sympathetic, but also found the whole situation amusing.

As they sat down to dinner, Zverkov began asking the narrator about his job and his salary, at which point Ferfichkin noted that the narrator was rather poor. The narrator attempted to switch the topic of conversation to something more intelligent, but the others instead decided to listen to Zverkov's boasting. The narrator was offended by the thought that the others thought they were doing him an honor by having dinner with him when, in fact, he was the one doing them the honor. Getting more and more drunk and more and more annoyed, he decided to offend them all and leave. After the others drank to Zverkov's health, the Underground Man stood up and made his own toast, insulting Zverkov. This began a quarrel in the course of which the narrator challenged Ferfichkin to a duel and the others insisted that he was drunk and should be thrown out. He wanted to throw a bottle at their head, but poured himself a glass instead.

At this point the others began to ignore the Underground Man completely and finally moved from table to couch. He wanted to be reconciled with them, but they would not acknowledge him. He then began to pace back and forth across the entire room to show the others that he didn't care about them, but they still ignored him. He thought that he had never humiliated himself so much in his life and wanted to show them just how intelligent and cultured he was. Finally the others decide to go to a brothel. The Underground Man attempts to apologize to them, but they laugh him off and leave. He begs Simonov for money to go to the brothel with them and finally Simonov throws it at him as he runs out. The Underground Man runs into the street and grabs a coach to follow them to the brothel determined that either they will all bow at his feet or he will slap Zverkov in the face.

Chapter 4 Analysis:

The Underground Man's arrival at the restaurant ahead of the others demonstrates his inability to handle reality. First off, the waiters ignore him entirely, bringing in candles only near the end of his wait. Again, he is like a fly: everyone ignores him and he is too proud to stand up for himself. This is another one of the narrator's character traits. He feels that his superiority should be obvious to everyone around him. If someone fails to recognize his superiority, or even his importance as a human being, the Underground Man ought to stand up for himself. He feels, however, that to do so would be to admit to everyone that his superiority is not obvious. Unable to deal with such an admission, the Underground Man prefers being ignored to demanding recognition. The main problem with the restaurant, however, is that other diners are present. Whether they make noise or simply sit silently at their tables, the Underground Man cannot tolerate them. Ordinary people always displease him because they are not literary. His need for literary events persistently comes up against the unedited, harsh reality around him.

When Zverkov finally arrives, he is extremely condescending to the Underground Man. The reason for this is quite possibly the fact that Zverkov's social status far exceeds the narrator's. As a general, Zverkov is not only allowed, but virtually mandated to look down on the poor civil servant within the context of a class-based society. This is probably the reason for Zverkov's remark to the Underground Man: "you could never insult me." Someone in the narrator's position is simply not fit, in the social context, to insult a superior like Zverko