Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary
devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.
The Wet Snow
It always seems to be snowing in the world the Underground
Man inhabits. The falling wet snow is more than simply an element
of setting: the monotony of the weather and the dreariness of the
snow echoes the changelessness and dreariness of the Underground
Man’s alienated life. The wet snow also serves to link the parts
of the novel that take place in the 1860s
(primarily Part I) with the parts that take place in the 1840s
(primarily Part II). The Underground Man recalls the story of the
dinner with Zverkov and his encounter with Liza because the same
wet snow that fell on those days is falling as he composes his Notes
from Underground.
L’Homme de la Nature et de la Vérité
The Underground Man is preoccupied with the idea of “l’homme
de la nature et de la vérité,” which is French for “the
man of nature and truth.” The phrase is a distortion of a sentence
from Confessions by the eighteenth-century French
philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Confessions is
a kind of autobiography meant to present a portrait of its author
“exactly from nature and in all its truth.” In Notes from
Underground, this “man of nature and truth” becomes the “unconscious
man,” the man of action against whom the Underground Man opposes
himself. This active man is healthy, single-minded—narrow-minded,
according to the Underground Man—and acts according to the laws
of nature and reason. The Underground Man disdains this type of
man for his blind faith, yet he also feels inferior to such a man,
considering himself a “mouse” or an “insect” in comparison. Among
the characters in the novel, Zverkov and the unnamed officer both
share characteristics of l’homme de la nature et de la vérité.
The Redeemed Prostitute
The motif of the redeemed prostitute was popular in progressive novels,
poems, and plays of the mid-nineteenth century. These works frequently
involved variations on a standard plot: an altruistic hero rescues
a young prostitute from a lifetime of degradation, using rhetoric
to awaken the noble instincts that have been buried in her soul.
In short, the hero appeals to the prostitute’s sense of the “beautiful
and lofty.”
The Underground Man has absorbed this literary convention, and,
wanting to imagine himself the hero of his own story, attempts to
rescue the prostitute Liza. This attempt is an ironic one, however. First,
it is symptomatic of the Underground Man’s desire to “live out”
literature in the real world. Moreover, the Underground Man is hardly
an appropriate person to rescue anyone, as his own life is as miserable
and empty as the lowliest prostitute’s.
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