Title: Notes From the Underground
Title: Notes From the UndergroundGeneral Category - Fiction
Genre: -Novella
Sub genre: -Psychological Novel
Nationality: -Russian
Time Period: - 19th Century
First and Last Read by Dr. Rearick -Fall 1978 - Spring 2007
Rated: -[B+]
Location: -Home Library and Office Library and the MVNU Main Frame
Read For The Novel and World Literature II
My Comments:
Notes from the Underground
Записки из подполья, Zapģski iz pņdpol'
(1864; Notes from Underground) [also translated in English as
Notes from the Underground or Letters from the Underworld)] is an unnamed first-person narrator delivers a brilliant attack on a set of beliefs shared by liberals and radicals: that it is possible to discover the laws of individual psychology, that human beings consequently have no free choice, that history is governed by laws, and that it is possible to design a utopian society based on the laws of society and human nature. Even if such a society could be built, the underground man argues, people would hate it just because it denied them caprice and defined them as utterly predictable. In the novella's second part the underground man recalls incidents from his past, which show him behaving, in answer to determinism, according to sheer spite. Dostoyevsky thus makes clear that the underground man's irrationalist solution is no better than the rationalists' systems. Notes from the Underground also parodied the bible of the radicals, Nikolay Chernyshevsky's utopian fiction What Is to Be Done? (1863).
"Dostoyevsky, Fyodor." Encyclopędia Britannica. 2005. Encyclopędia Britannica Online
7 Apr. 2005 <http://search.eb.com/eb/article?tocId=59054>.
Links
Plot "To be too conscious is an illness."
The novel is divided into two rough parts.
Part 1
falls into three main
sections. The short introduction propounds a number of riddles whose meanings
will be further developed.
1 Sections two, three and four deal with suffering and the enjoyment of suffering;
2 Sections five and six with intellectual and moral vacillation and with conscious "inertia"-inaction; sections seven through nine with theories of reason and advantage;
3 The last two sections are a summary and a transition into Part 2.
Part 1, therefore, focuses primarily on man's desire to distinguish himself from nature. The narrator describes this as his spitefulness. It is elaborated into not only a spitefulness for authority and morality, but for causality itself. War is described as people's rebellion against the assumption that everything needs to happen for a purpose, because humans do things without purpose, and this is what determines human history. Secondly, the narrator's desire for pain and paranoia (which parallels Raskolnikov's behavior in Crime and Punishment) is exemplified in a tooth ache, which he says human beings only moan about to spread their suffering to others due to the cruelty of society (and he desires to have one), and paranoia which he builds up in his head to the point he is incapable of looking his co-workers in the eye. The main issue is that the underground man has reached a point of inactivity. Unlike most people, who typically act out of revenge because they believe justice is the end, he is conscious of this problem. Because of this, though he feels the desire for revenge, he is unable to complete it and thus his feelings of spite are given rise because he is simply left to feel guilt at even thinking of revenge. He feels that others like him exist, yet he continuously concentrates on his spitefulness instead of on action that avoids the problems he is so concerned with. He even admits at one point that he’d rather be inactive out of laziness. The first section also gives a harsh criticism of determinism and humanity’s movement towards attempting at outlining human action, which the underground man mentions in terms of a simple math problem (2x2=4). He states that despite humanity’s attempt to create the Crystal Palace (a reference to a famous symbol in Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What is to be Done?), it cannot avoid the simple fact that anyone at any time can decide to act against what is considered good, simply to state one’s existence.
The
second part is the actual story proper and consists of
three main segments that lead to a furthering of the
underground man’s super-consciousness.
1. The first is his obsession with an officer who moves him out of position like a piece of furniture at a bar. He sees the man on the streets and thinks of ways to get his revenge, eventually deciding to bump into him, which he does, to find, to his surprise, that the officer does not seem to even notice it happened.
2. The second segment is a dinner party with some old school friends to wish Zverkov goodbye as he leaves for the service. The underground man hated them when he was younger, but after a random visit to Simonov’s he decides to meet them at the appointed location. They forget to tell him that the time has been changed to six instead of five, so he arrives early. He gets into an argument with the three after a short time, declaring all of his hatred of society and using them as the symbol of it. At the end they go off without him to a secret brothel, and in his rage later that evening the underground man goes there to confront Zverkov once and for all, regardless if he is beaten or not. It is there that he meets and has sex with Lisa, a young prostitute.
3. He wakes up and the third segment begins. After sitting in silence for awhile, the underground man confronts Lisa, who is unwavering at first, but eventually realizes the plight of her position and how she will slowly become useless and go lower and lower until she is no longer wanted by anyone. The thought of dying such a terribly disgraceful death brings her to realize her position, and she then finds herself enthralled by the underground man’s seemingly poignant grasp of society’s ills. He gives her his address and leaves. After this, he is overcome by the fear of her actually arriving at his dilapidated apartment, and in the middle of an argument with his servant, she arrives. He then curses her and takes back everything he said to her, saying he was in fact laughing at her and reiterates the truth of her miserable position. Near the end of his painful rage he wells up in tears after saying that he was only seeking to have power over her and a desire to humiliate her. He begins to criticize himself and states that he is in fact horrified by his own poverty and embarrassed by his situation. Lisa realizes how pitiful he is and they embrace. The underground man cries out “They – they won’t let me – I – I can’t be good!” After this he still acts terribly towards her and before she leaves he stuffs something into her hand, which she throws onto the table. It was a five ruble note. He tries to catch her as she goes out onto the street but cannot find her and never hears from her again. He recalls this moment as making him unhappy whenever he thinks of it, yet again proving the fact from the first section that his spite for society and his inability to act like it makes him unable to act better than it.
