Summary
[S]he was going to pay dearly for it
all . . .
(See Important Quotations Explained)
When Liza gets up to leave, thinking she has disturbed
the Underground Man, he suddenly explodes in a long, disorganized
speech. He tells Liza that he never intended to save her from prostitution. Instead,
he manipulated her with “pathetic words” so that he could humiliate
her as Zverkov and the others had humiliated him earlier that night
at dinner. The Underground Man tells Liza that he was only interested
in exerting power over her, but that in a moment of weakness and
fear he gave her his address. He adds that his greatest worry over
the last three days has been that she might see him in his shabby
dressing gown, and that she might learn that he is not the great
hero she may have believed him to be. Now he will never forgive
her for seeing him in this sordid environment, nor will he forgive
her for listening to his hysterical speech.
At the beginning of the tirade, Liza is crushed, but by
the end she understands that the Underground Man is unhappy, and
she is filled with an agonizing sympathy for him. She throws her
arms around him and begins to cry. The Underground Man responds
by throwing himself face down on the sofa and sobbing for fifteen
minutes.
Soon, the Underground Man begins to feel ashamed again,
realizing that the roles have been reversed: in the brothel it was
Liza who lay face down and sobbed while the Underground Man preached
to her, but now Liza is the heroine and the Underground Man is the “humiliated
creature.” When he gets up from the sofa, he wants to dominate Liza
again. She misreads his hatred and desire for revenge as genuine
passion, and embraces him.
Analysis
At the beginning of Chapter IX, the Underground Man notes
that he will make Liza “pay dearly” for “this.” We might ask ourselves what
“this” is: his shameful house, his clothes, his nervous demeanor,
his ugly face, or perhaps his miserable future. Liza becomes the
repository for all the aggression he has built up against those
he perceives as having slighted him throughout life. In this way,
the Underground Man makes a transition from victim to victimizer.
When Liza responds to the Underground Man’s tirade with sympathy
and affection rather than horror or anger, we understand for the
first time that she is a truly sensitive, perceptive, and loving person.
She is intuitive enough to see that the Underground Man’s cruel
words stem from his insecurity, loneliness, and pride. Because she
is grateful to the Underground Man for opening her eyes to the futility
of her own situation as a prostitute, she naturally wants to help
him as he has helped her. Even if she had not been grateful to the Underground
Man, she might have responded in the same way, out of a human instinct
to comfort anyone who is suffering.
This revelation of Liza’s true character is somewhat ironic
in the context of the novel. Throughout Part II, we have seen the
Underground Man try to make the world around him fit the conventions of
Romantic literature; now we see how the real world thwarts his attempts.
Officers are never honorable, duels are never fought, and no one
appreciates the Underground Man’s sensitivity or his esteem for
“the beautiful and lofty” as much as they should. We might expect
the Underground Man’s attempt to impose another literary convention—the
redeemed prostitute—upon the banal realities of 1840s
St. Petersburg to end in total failure. Based on what we have seen
in the novel thus far, we expect the prostitute to laugh at the Underground
Man’s impassioned speeches just as the officer would have laughed
at the idea of a duel. At the very least, we expect the prostitute
to turn out to be as coarse and narrow-minded as all the people
the Underground Man derides. Instead, Liza is a heroine worthy of
a Romantic novel—gentle, simple, and kind.
Unfortunately, because the Underground Man has never been the
object of this kind of interest and sympathy, he has no idea how to
handle it. When Liza first puts her arms around the Underground Man,
he is so confused that he bursts into tears and allows her to comfort
him. It must come as an immense relief for him to receive love and
tenderness after a lifetime of indifference and abuse. In this light,
the Underground Man’s reaction is entirely understandable, as he
is finally given an opportunity to display an emotion other than
anger or resentment. However, we remember the Underground Man’s
comments in Part I about the intense shame he feels after displays
of “sentimentality” or emotion. We also remember that the only way
he can think of love is as a sadomasochistic relationship in which
one person dominates and the other is dominated. Rather than concentrate
on love as a mutual exchange of tenderness and sympathy, in which
he and Liza might comfort each other, the Underground Man can only
see that the roles in their relationship have been reversed. He
has lost his power over Liza, and now she dominates him. Liza is
the only person in the novel over whom the Underground Man has felt
any true sense of power, and he is furious with her for taking that
power away from him. His sentiment toward her quickly turns to hate,
as he wants to reclaim his power over her and wants to punish her
for taking this power away from him. At the end of the chapter,
the Underground Man resolves to exert his power over Liza physically,
by possessing her sexually and treating her as a prostitute even
as she believes they are engaging in an act of love.
