Summary
After the initial sense of his victory wears off, the
Underground Man becomes nauseated and repentant, just as he described
in “Underground.” To escape these unpleasant feelings, he retreats
into intense, rapturous dreams in which he becomes a noble hero.
All his mockery dissolves in “faith, hope, and love,” and he imagines
that wonderful opportunities for activity will present themselves
to him.
Sometimes, flashes of the “beautiful and lofty” come upon
the Underground Man in the middle of his debauches, and he says
that the contrast between these flashes of loftiness and the degradation of
his debauches creates a delicious suffering. In his dreams he feels love,
though he feels no need to apply the love to his real life. His dreams
always end with artistic moments stolen from poetry and novels.
He describes the scenes of his dreams: they combine elements from
the life of Napoleon and from Lord Byron’s Manfred, a poem
about a proud and gloomy hero. The Underground Man imagines that
his audience considers vulgar, and he is ashamed of himself for
needing to justify his own dreams.
After three months of dreaming, the ecstasy of his dreams
makes the Underground Man want to embrace mankind. He feels the
need to “rush into society.” His only social outlet is the chief
of his department, Anton Antonych Setochkin. On Tuesdays, the Underground
Man can drink tea at Setochkin’s house with Setochkin’s two daughters
and one or two other guests. At tea, the Underground Man invariably
becomes paralyzed, incapable of participating in conversation. When
he goes home, though, he feels he has been cured of his need for
social interaction for a while.
One Thursday, the Underground Man becomes too lonely to wait
until the following Tuesday and decides to visit a former classmate,
Simonov. Although the Underground Man considered his time at school
“penal servitude” and has cut off relations with most of his classmates,
he believes that Simonov is less narrow-minded and more honest than
the others, and therefore maintains a relationship with him. The
Underground Man suspects that he disgusts Simonov, but he is not
sure.
Analysis
The subject matter of the Underground Man’s dreams is
further evidence that he has fully absorbed the European literary
and cultural models that Dostoevsky believed were artificially imposed
upon Russia. The figures with which the Underground Man identifies
his “heroic” self come from French and English history and literature: many
of the details and imagery of his great dreams come from the life
of Napoleon, while others are related to the fictional Manfred from
Lord Byron’s poem. These dreams show us that the Underground Man
is capable of genuine emotion and pleasure: he describes the dreams
as “sweet” and refuses to dismiss them. However, his expression
of these pleasant feelings is misdirected. Rather than share his
feelings with others, the Underground Man expresses them in imaginary
situations, using the imagery of an alien culture—that of western
Europe. His fantasies, then, have no place in the world in which
he lives. The Underground Man’s dreams function as an allegory for
the irrelevancy of Western culture imposed on Russian lives. The
dreams also indicate that the Underground Man’s real life has been
so devoid of satisfying human interaction that he can only find
models for happiness and triumph in literature.
The Underground Man does, of course, have urges to interact socially
with other human beings. These urges come after several months of
“dreaming.” After immersing himself in a world modeled on literature
rather than real life, he feels that he is capable of interacting
with people. Comfortable in the realm of the literary and in the
landscape of his own imagination, the Underground Man is able to
convince himself that he is capable of participating in the real social
world. Moreover, his sizable ego drives him to want to share his
wonderful thoughts and feelings with the rest of the world. This urge
to socialize also reveals that the twenty-four-year-old Underground
Man is not yet entirely entrenched in the underground—he wants to
interact with the outside world.
