Summary: Chapter V
[P]erhaps I really regard myself as an
intelligent man only because throughout my entire life I've never
been able to start or finish anything.
See Important Quotations Explained
The Underground Man describes his occasional bouts of
repentance, tenderheartedness, and sentimentality. He feels these
emotions frequently, and imagines that he is feeling them sincerely. However,
he always ends up convincing himself that these moments are nothing
but affectations and delusions. He explains that all of the emotional
torment he has undergone in his life has been the result of boredom.
In an attempt to make his life into something he could “live, at
least somehow, a little,” he convinces himself that someone has
offended him, or forces himself to fall in love. These ineffectual
gestures toward living are the Underground Man’s compensation for
the inertia his consciousness imposes upon him.
The Underground Man repeats his earlier point that only
narrow-minded people can be truly active, because their lack of
consciousness allows them the comforting belief that there are absolute principles
upon which they can base their actions. The Underground Man, in
contrast, has nothing solid to support his actions, not even pure
wickedness. He analyzes his actions until the idea of cause and
effect dissolves. Moreover, the Underground Man also overanalyzes
his rebellions against this inertia—his blind attempts at love or
anger—until he hates himself for forcing false emotions, and therefore
feels paralyzed and becomes more inert than ever. He feels he is
an intelligent man only because he has never been able to start
or finish anything. In this regard, his inertia is a mark of his consciousness.
Summary: Chapter VI
The Underground Man describes the difference between inertia
and laziness. He defines laziness as a positive quality: a lazy
person can be identified positively as a “lazybones,” whereas the
Underground Man is identifiable only by qualities that he lacks.
The Underground Man imagines himself as a “lazybones”: he would
spend all his time drinking to the health of everything “beautiful
and lofty,” and would convince himself that everything, even the
ugliest things in the world, were “beautiful and lofty” so that
he could drink even more. He would demand respect for his opinions
and die in peace, extremely fat and “positive” from all of his drinking
and eating, a “positive” in a “negative age.”
Summary: Chapter VII
The Underground Man attempts to debunk the mid-nineteenth-century
progressive idea that man, if he were to understand his own true
interests clearly, would never do anything bad because it is most advantageous
to him to behave rationally. The Underground Man, in contrast, believes
that man consciously acts to his own disadvantage, simply to be
obstinate. He questions the meaning of the word “advantage,” claiming
that utilitarian theorists derived their list of advantages—prosperity,
wealth, freedom, peace—from statistical figures and politico-economic
formulas. The Underground Man suggests that there is one “strange
advantage,” which he will explain later, that evades these classifications.
This “strange advantage” explains why an enlightened man may suddenly
and perversely act against what appears to be his own advantage.
The Underground Man goes on to claim that the rules of
logic can never predict human behavior. He mentions the English
historian Henry Thomas Buckle’s theory that civilization gradually
softens men, making them incapable of waging war. This theory, while logically
sound, is disproved by the fact that more blood has been shed in
the ostensibly civilized nineteenth century than in more barbaric
times.
The Underground Man predicts that man would grow bored
in a society based on scientifically derived formulas for moral
behavior. In the end, “ungrateful” men would welcome the chance
to overturn logic and live according to their own irrational free
will. The Underground Man thinks that man, under any circumstance,
prefers to think he is acting as he wants to act,
not as reason dictates. The “strange advantage” mentioned earlier
is complete free will—even the choice to do something self-destructive.
The most important thing to man is that his freedom of choice not
be constrained by anything—even reason.
