Summary: Chapter VIII
Who wants to want according to a little
table?
See Important Quotations Explained
The Underground Man responds to his imagined audience’s
claim that free will is something that can be explained scientifically,
just as every other human urge can be. He argues that science, regardless
of what it might discover about the human will, cannot change the
fact that man refuses to accept that his free will is subject to
rules. Man, he contends, will do anything to demonstrate this independence
of will. The only constants in man’s behavior are that he is ungrateful and
refuses to be sensible. Man may even intentionally go insane, simply
to prove that his free will is not subject to reason and that he may
behave irrationally if he so desires.
Analysis: Chapters V–VIII
This section addresses the tension between the ideologies
of the sentimental and idealistic 1840s,
when the Underground Man was a young man, and the more utilitarian
and scientific 1860s, the time in which he
is writing Notes from Underground. The Underground Man
displays a mixture of contempt and longing for the ideal of genuine
love. He displays the same conflicted attitude toward the sublime
literature of the Enlightenment and Romantic periods, when everyone
from the philosopher Immanuel Kant to the writer Victor Hugo celebrated
the “beautiful and lofty.” The Underground Man is clearly familiar
with the major writers of these periods, as he makes references
throughout the novel to works by the French novelists Victor Hugo
and Georges Sand, the English poet Lord Byron, and the Russian Romantics
Aleksandr Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov. The Underground Man’s attempts
to “live a little” are, in a sense, attempts to experience the powerful
emotions that the Romantic writers valued. Though the Underground
Man prides himself on his ability to recognize the “beautiful and
lofty,” his disgust with himself and with society has crushed any
faith he may have had in Romantic ideals. As a result, he feels
disgusted with himself whenever he feels strong emotions, and he
mocks the idea of the “beautiful and lofty” when he imagines himself
as an alcoholic aesthete-lazybones in Chapter VI.
The 1860s in Europe were marked
by an increased interest in social reform based on scientific principles.
Utopian thinkers believed that life could be perfected solely through
the application of reason and enlightened self-interest. Any serious
problems remaining in the world existed only because the scientific
method for getting rid of them had not yet been discovered. One
of the most prominent Russian proponents of these ideas was N. G.
Chernyshevsky, who developed the theory of “rational egoism” and
wrote a revolutionary novel called What Is to Be Done? in 1863.
Dostoevsky, contemptuous of Chernyshevsky’s theories, frequently attacks
and parodies the theorist’s ideologies throughout Notes from
Underground. Among Chernyshevsky’s ideas, Dostoevsky found
his theories of “rational egoism” particularly offensive. A character
in What Is to Be Done? asserts that, in following
his own desires, he will make other people happy; he ends with the
question “Do you hear that, you, in your underground hole?” In many
ways, Notes from Underground is the response from
that underground hole, a long protest against the idea that a man
must be happy merely because others want him to be.
The Underground Man resists the idea of rational egoism,
believing man to be an inherently irrational creature. Man will
always try to assert his free will, even if asserting this free
will goes against reason and self-interest. The Underground Man
believes so because he can think of no other explanation for the
way others have treated him in his life. If human nature were inherently
good, no one could ever act the way most people act toward him.
However, the Underground Man, as he mentions in Chapter I, would
prefer to have a rotting liver than bend to a doctor’s authority.
He is clearly obsessed with free will, and seems to project this
obsession onto others.
In these chapters, the Underground Man continues to use
his intelligence as an excuse for his inactivity, and his inactivity
as proof of his intelligence. He considers active men universally
“dull and narrow-minded”—the very traits that allow them to act.
In contrast, the Underground Man’s supreme intelligence does not
permit him to assuage any of the doubts that encumber action. Every
question that he begins to resolve presents him with new, unanswerable questions.
In earlier chapters, he says that intelligence necessarily results
in inactivity, but now he implies that inactivity is in itself an indication
of intelligence. The Underground Man claims that it is possible
that he only considers himself intelligent because he has “never
been able to start or finish anything.”
Conversely, the Underground Man sees action as an indication
of low intelligence. In Chapter VI, when he imagines himself as
a “positive” man whose life has some kind of goal, the image that
he creates is parodic and absurd. The goal he imagines for himself
is the celebration of everything “beautiful and lofty,” and the
image he creates—of a man with indiscriminate but strongly held
opinions—is laughable. This example illustrates what happens when
we place too much value on opinion for opinion’s sake. Taken in
the context of the Underground Man’s comments about his own intelligence,
it can also be read as a commentary on decisiveness in general.
Indeed, the Underground Man’s main criticism of the rational theorists
in Chapter VII is that they have chosen a system and decided to
stick by it. These theorists’ refusal to allow the possibility that
their laws are fallible puts them, in the Underground Man’s eyes,
on par with the stupidest man in the world.
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