Analysis
Many critics consider the moment when Liza slams the door
to be the climax of the second half of Notes from Underground. Liza
is perhaps the only hope for the Underground Man’s redemption, as she
is perceptive and patient enough to see through his proud, hostile
façade to understand his mental anguish. In short, she is kind enough
to care about him. In this last chapter, when Liza casts away the
money, we—and the Underground Man—understand that she is also noble,
moral, and as proud as the Underground Man himself.
The discovery of the crumpled bill is an important moment
for the Underground Man. His self-absorption and lack of positive experiences
with others have not prepared him for the possibility that other
people could perform noble gestures such as Liza’s. She has a genuine
sense of the “beautiful and lofty” herself, though it is couched
in modesty, shyness, and simplicity. Liza could have emerged from
the pages of any sentimental novel or poem. Somehow, the Underground
Man’s artificial pastiche of literary conventions in the brothel
has found him a real-life romantic heroine. The slamming door, however,
signals Liza’s irrevocable disappearance from his life, and its
sound resounds throughout the building. The Underground Man has
been shut underground for good, with no more chances of escape.
When Liza has gone, the Underground Man immediately begins to
rationalize her departure. Unsurprisingly, although he is totally unable
to handle the responsibility of a relationship with her while she
is present, in retrospect he imagines that he has been an important
event in her life. He believes that the initial hatred and eventual forgiveness
she will feel toward him will purify and elevate her. In reality,
Liza could perhaps have purified and elevated the Underground Man,
but he cannot allow himself to recognize the regret he feels. Even
though he declares that he will never recall the moment with indifference,
we see that he has already begun to try to lessen its emotional
importance. When he focuses on the literary merits of his thoughts
about Liza, he reproaches himself for his egoism—but that very egoism
is the only tool he has to distract himself from the significance
of Liza’s departure. The Underground Man’s distrust of his own emotional
responses comes partially from his general skepticism about the
good of human beings. This distrust also allows him to endure his
existence underground: if he believes that his emotions are artificial,
then he can discount them.
The Underground Man’s statement that he will “never .
. . recall this moment with indifference” is also important to the
structure of Notes from Underground. Some commentators
have found the novel’s two-part structure strange, as the second
part comes chronologically before the first. We have already seen
how this structure works to illuminate and explain the Underground
Man’s character, using concrete examples from the second part to
illustrate abstract statements from the first part. This quotation
from the end of the second part unifies the two “fragments,” as
the twenty-four-year-old Underground Man seems to be speaking almost
directly to the forty-year-old Underground Man who is narrating
his story. By the end of the novel, we see that the Underground
Man is still unable to recall the moment of Liza’s departure with
indifference. We understand why he has chosen this particular memory
for his strange memoir: it is the moment at which it becomes certain
that the twenty-four-year-old Underground Man will become the forty-year-old
Underground Man, totally isolated and alienated in his “underground.”
We also understand why he feels that it is time to end his notes
for good. He has lived through a crucial moment in his life, and
he feels no better for having lived through it. He only recognizes
the significance of his loss.
The Underground Man ends his notes with an accusation
aimed at us, his audience. He tells us that we are all like him
in a way, but that we lack the courage to take our lives to the
extreme to which he has taken his. We probably do not want to believe
this statement, and we certainly would not consider ourselves better
off if we lived the same life as the Underground Man. Dostoevsky,
however, is using the Underground Man to show us how modern urban
life does alienate us from ourselves and other people. Most contemporary
readers of Notes from Underground refused to recognize
themselves in the Underground Man. They preferred to consider him
an interesting psychological study of a highly abnormal person rather than
a casualty of societal problems to which they, too, were exposed.
However, the Underground Man’s theories and behavior resonate in
much of modern literature, from Dostoevsky’s later novels to Jean-Paul
Sartre, Albert Camus, and others. As the western world has absorbed Notes
from Underground into its cultural heritage, its literature
seems to have decided that there are many more people living underground
than we might have guessed.
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