Context
Plot Overview
Character List
Analysis of Major Characters
Themes, Motifs & Symbols
Part I, Chapter I
Part I, Chapters II–IV
Part I, Chapters V–VIII
Part I, Chapters IX–XI
Part II, Chapter I
Part II, Chapter II
Part II, Chapter III
Part II, Chapters IV–V
Part II, Chapter VI–VII
Part II, Chapter VIII
Part II, Chapter IX
Part II, Chapter X
Important Quotations Explained
Key Facts
Study Questions & Essay Topics
Quiz
Suggestions for Further Reading
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Notes from Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky
Part I, Chapters II–IV
Summary: Chapter II
The Underground Man continues to describe himself. He
is “overly conscious,” a “developed man” who possesses far more
consciousness than is necessary for survival in the nineteenth century.
Narrow-minded, active people, in contrast, have the perfect amount
of consciousness of reality to go about their daily lives. The Underground
Man explains that he does not mean to deride these active figures
by suggesting that they are not as conscious as he is, but then he
immediately admits that he takes pride in his “sickness” of consciousness.
He describes how his consciousness, which makes him aware of “everything
beautiful and lofty,” somehow inevitably drags him into corruption
and “blight,” a blight in which he has gradually learned to take
a sick pleasure.
The end result of this consciousness is always inertia.
The Underground Man believes that degradation is inherent in his
nature and therefore impossible to change, which affords him a degree
of satisfaction. Another kind of strangled satisfaction comes from
the fact that the Underground Man, even though he despises himself,
considers himself more intelligent than everyone around him, and therefore
feels responsible for everything that happens to him. This sense
of responsibility, of course, also increases his misery, and makes
his pride in his own intelligence a source of shame.
Summary: Chapter III
The Underground Man further explains his inability to
act in any directed fashion, whether magnanimously or vengefully.
Once again, the problem is rooted in his self-consciousness. Normal
men act immediately and blindly upon their instincts. In contrast
to this kind of man, whom the Underground Man considers stupid but manly,
the highly conscious Underground Man is nothing more than a mouse.
While the normal man can perceive an act of revenge as an act of
justice, the Underground Man, when wronged, is too conscious of
the complexities of revenge to retaliate with genuine faith and
confidence. Therefore, he ends up slinking back into his underground
hole to dwell on whatever wrong has been done to him until it has
almost consumed him.
A man of action follows his desire to act only until he
is faced with definite impossibility, at which point he is reassured
by the fact that further action will be useless. The Underground
Man, however, claims that conscious men refuse to be reconciled
with the laws of nature, science, and mathematics that other men
take for granted. Even though the Underground Man is conscious of
the reality of these laws, he refuses to agree with them if he does
not like them.
Summary: Chapter IV
“Next you'll be finding pleasure in a
toothache!” you will exclaim, laughing.
“And why not? There is also pleasure in a toothache,”
I will answer.
The Underground Man continues to illustrate the aesthetics
of misery, demonstrating how the educated, conscious man of the
nineteenth century can find pleasure even in a toothache. This pleasure comes
from the unnecessary, almost artistically embellished moans and
groans that the man uses to signal to his family and friends that he
has a toothache, as well as from his awareness that his family is disgusted
and irritated with his displays of agony. After making this argument,
the Underground Man responds to the laughter that he imagines he
has elicited from his audience, and explains that his jokes are
in bad tone because he does not respect himself: “[H]ow can a man
of consciousness have the slightest respect for himself?”
Analysis: Chapters II–IV
When the Underground Man implies that his great intelligence
and heightened consciousness prevent him from being an “active man,” saying
that active people are always “disingenuous,” he is rationalizing
his inability to act. However, the fact that the Underground Man
deludes himself about the source of his alienation does not mean
that Dostoevsky necessarily wants to glorify the “man of action.”
Indeed, the novel criticizes equally those people who spend too
much time contemplating the “beautiful and lofty” and those people
who act decisively but blindly.
In Chapter II, the Underground Man essentially divides
the world into two groups. The first group contains people who are both
“disingenuous” and “active.” These people are not necessarily stupid,
but they are at most half as “conscious” as the Underground Man.
Because they are unable to analyze every decision they make, they
are able to make these decisions painlessly. They do not analyze obstacles
any more than they analyze their own motives, so when they come
to an obstacle they stop in their tracks without any concern. The
second group that the Underground Man envisions contains educated,
conscious people like him. These individuals spend all their time
contemplating their own degradation.
This distinction between the two groups foreshadows the
existentialist philosophy of writers like Jean-Paul Sartre, who
considered Notes from Underground the first existentialist
novel. Sartre believed that every human being is totally free and
completely responsible for every choice he makes. In Sartre's work,
those characters who become aware of the terrible responsibility
that accompanies every choice they make often are unable to bring
themselves to do anything. Like the narrow-minded men in the first
of the Underground Man's two groups, the only people who act with
total confidence in Sartre's works are those who are not conscious
of their freedom and responsibility. Nonetheless, Sartre believes
that the conscious man must act, however little
the idea appeals to him.
It may seem odd that the Underground Man aligns the laws
of science and mathematics with the less intelligent men, as we
usually think of those disciplines as requiring education and intelligence. However,
for the Underground Man, a conscious man is someone who questions
and analyzes everything, even the validity of so-called natural
laws. Someone who has blind faith in everything, even in logic and
reason, fits the Underground Man's definition of an unconscious
man. This definition allows the Underground Man to include some
of the most prominent intellectuals of the era in his criticism,
and paves the way for his upcoming critique of the “rational” theorists
in Chapter VII.
Of course, the Underground Man considers his consciousness
a curse even as he takes pride in it. This masochistic idea becomes
literal when he discusses the pleasure that a cultured man can find
in a toothache. Though the Underground Man is ashamed of this pleasure,
as he is ashamed of anything he finds enjoyable or worthy of pride,
he believes it is the only kind of pleasure available to the truly developed
man in the nineteenth century. This moment is one of several instances
in the novel when Dostoevsky's message likely differs from the Underground
Man's: we see the toothache as an example of the absurdity that
arises when intelligence and sensitivity are unaccompanied by action.
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