Summary
As the final chapter opens, the Underground Man is running
frantically around his room and looking at Liza through a crack
between the screens in the wall. Liza realizes that the Underground
Man’s desire for her does not come from love, but from a desire
to humiliate and dominate her. She realizes that he hates her and
envies her.
The Underground Man explains why he is incapable of love.
He says that, for him, love consists only of the right to tyrannize
someone else. He cannot understand unselfish love, and he has failed
to understand that Liza has come to see him because of love rather than
because of his elaborate, “pathetic” speeches. At this point, though,
the Underground Man only wants “peace”—the pressure of “living life”
and interacting with others is becoming too much for him.
Liza gets up to leave. The Underground Man forces some
money into her hand in a last, malicious attempt to humiliate her.
He claims in his narration that the urge to humiliate her did not
come from his heart; he did it only because it seemed appropriately
literary, and after he did it he was ashamed.
The Underground Man calls after Liza immediately after
she leaves, but she does not respond. He hears the door slam as
she leaves the building. A minute later, he finds the money he gave
her crumpled on the table, realizing that she threw it away before
she left the apartment. The Underground Man is shocked that Liza could
be capable of such a noble action. He runs after her into the falling
snow, but she is gone. The Underground Man is distraught and wants
to beg her forgiveness. He declares that he will never remember
this moment with indifference. A moment later, though, he convinces
himself that Liza will be purified and elevated by the hatred and
forgiveness that his insult will inspire in her. At the same time,
he is conscious of the literary merit of his own thoughts, and feels
ashamed that he is focusing on that literary merit rather than on
Liza’s welfare.
Back in the present, the flashback finished, the Underground Man
decides that “all this comes out somehow none too well in my recollection.”
He decides that perhaps he will end his notes at this point. He
wonders if he should have written them at all, for they are not
“literature, but corrective punishment.” His antisocial life in
the underground is “not interesting,” especially since he is not
a hero, but rather an antihero whose dread of “living life” is all
too familiar to the reader. The Underground Man accuses his readers
of having all of the problems that he has, but refusing to carry
them through to their logical conclusion. Perhaps, he suggests,
he is more “living” than his more active readers.
Suggesting that modern men, ashamed of the fleshly reality
of their lives, retreat more and more into abstract ideas, the Underground
Man decides not to write any more notes. A note Dostoevsky writes
at the end tells us that the Underground Man could not keep this
resolution to stop writing, and instead continued to write compulsively.
Dostoevsky writes that this point in the notes seems like a good
place to stop, however, so the novel ends here.
