Out of Egypt:

Get me away from here I'm dyin'; sing me a song to set me free...

Well, here it is. My last paper of the semester. 10 hours - 5 research, 5 writing. One night.

It's on Dostoevsky. Enjoy it.

Well, as much as you can enjoy anything on Notes from the Underground, a novel that has tempted some people to commit suicide. Not me, though - it's painful, but possibly even redemptive. That could be (and has been) the subject for another essay. But not tonight.

Dostoevsky’s Underground Man: Philosophical or Pathological?

Dostoevsky’s vision of the world is violent and his characters tortured; it is no wonder that many have viewed his work as prophetic of the 20th century. However, though Dostoevsky, in his unflinching portrayal of depravity, gives the Devil some of his best arguments, the Gospel often triumphs. Ivan Karamazov is at least offered the possibility of repentance when kissed by his saintly brother Alyosha. Raskolnikov, the nihilistic antihero of Crime and Punishment, is eventually redeemed through the love of the pure prostitute Sonja.

Notes from the Underground, however, breaks this pattern. The protagonist of this novel, who, uncharacteristically for Dostoevsky, is also the narrator, is not redeemed by his encounter with a prostitute, but rather degrades both her and himself by his actions. While Notes from the Underground has often been analyzed from a philosophical perspective, as Dostoevsky’s defense of free will against the mechanistic determinism and utilitarian moral theories popular in his day, it is more properly viewed as a character study. This view is necessitated, Ralph Matlaw writes, by the unreliability of the underground man as a guide to his own character and motivations (102). One who consistently proves to be a liar in matters of fact is not likely to be an honest theoretician either. The underground man himself, nearing the conclusion of his philosophical reflections, writes, “I swear to you, gentlemen, there is not one thing, not one word of what I have written that I really believe. That is, I believe it, perhaps, but at the same time I feel and suspect that I am lying like a cobbler” (Dostoevsky 212).

Regarding the novel as primarily a character study rather than a philosophical treatise preserves the unity of its two parts, so that the second section is not seen as an addendum to the first, merely an enactment of the principles which the underground man has already stated abstractly (Matlaw 101). Notes from the Underground, despite its unpolished narrative and paradoxical narrator, is a coherent whole, a subtle portrait of a man in conflict with himself. The first portion of the Notes is “a revelation of personality,” according to J. M. Coetzee, whereas the second is “a revelation of a shameful history” (219).

The two cannot be separated from each other; both are necessary to complete the underground man’s portrait. Though he may put on a bold front in the ideological jabs of the first section, the second shows his ineffectual character, the seemingly irresolvable paradoxes of his personality. The underground man is paralyzed by indecision, governed by spite. His inability to “live life” is a malady that has grown prevalent in the “educated nineteenth century” (Dostoevsky 296, 191). As Dostoevsky writes in a footnote at the beginning of the work, “such persons as the writer of these notes not only may, but positively must, exist in our society, when we consider the circumstances under our society was formed” (179). The true philosophical lessons of the Notes are implicit, hidden within the narrative, and condemn the underground man as much as they do his rationalist opponents.

Any satisfactory analysis of Notes from the Underground must keep in mind the singular consciousness and unreliability of its narrator. If he is simply the mouthpiece for Dostoevsky’s own ideas, then why is the novel structured as it is, placing Dostoevsky at a double remove from the events it recounts? As Gary Rosenshield writes, the underground man who tells the story is not the same as the underground man who acts in it, and neither can be identified with Dostoevsky, whose hidden judgment hides behind both (325). Though Dostoevsky does employ the underground man’s philosophies as a polemic against Chernyshevsky and the other fashionable philosophers of the day, one must also consider how the underground man’s philosophy functions as a rationalization of his own behavior.

Some readers have taken the underground man’s philosophy as a bold statement of Dostoevsky’s existentialist faith in the freedom of the human will, his refusal to be a “piano key” in a future deterministic utopia (Dostoevsky 206). This reading, while it does contain some truth, is superficial, confusing the real author of the Notes, Dostoevsky, with their fictional author. Bernard Paris, in his psychological analysis of the underground man, writes that the well-integrated individual, one who feels in possession of himself, does not need to assert his freedom every minute, as does the underground man (229).
Furthermore, the underground man’s critique of utilitarian moral theory, specifically the concept of the highest good, rests on a characterization of humanity as irrational, perverse, and destructive. The underground man writes that “man may consciously, purposely desire what is injurious to himself…– simply in order to have the right to desire for himself even what is very stupid and not to be bound by an obligation to desire what is sensible” (Dostoevsky 204). Even suffering can sometimes be an object of desire, he writes, since it is “the sole source of consciousness,” which is “infinitely superior to [the] twice two makes four” world of the rationalists (209).

In order to accept this philosophy as a true account of human nature, Ralph Matlaw writes, one would also have to take at face value the underground man’s account of himself in the second part of the novel (106). Regarding the underground man as a reliable narrator is impossible, however. As James Lethcoe writes, Dostoevsky, as implied author, shows the underground man’s unreliability even in the novel’s first paragraph (13). The underground man begins his account of himself with self-loathing and contradiction:
"I am a sick man…I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However…I don’t consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors" (Dostoevsky 179).
Soon after this, he shows the spirit which made Dostoevsky call him a “paradoxicalist” (297). He says, possibly without realizing the contradiction, “I was lying when I said just now I was a spiteful individual. I was lying from spite” (181). This spirit of contradiction continues through the novel, recurring a few paragraphs later when the underground man speaks about aging. At first he says “forty years is a whole lifetime; you know it is extreme old age. To live longer than forty years is bad manners, is vulgar, immoral” (181). However, a few sentences later, he says that he has a right to make this statement, since he intends to live to eighty himself (182).

Perhaps the most interesting of the underground man’s paradoxes is that identified by Gary Saul Morson. At the end of the novel’s first part, the underground man declares, “…[I]f I write as though I were addressing readers, it is simply because it is easier for me to write in this form. It is a form, an empty form – I shall never have readers” (Dostoevsky 214). He then denies that he will write his reminiscences in any systematic fashion. However, he follows this by saying, “[S]omeone will catch at the word and ask me: if you really don’t reckon on readers, why do make such compacts with yourself…Why are you explaining? Why do you apologize?” (214) This paradox will remain unresolved through the course of the novel.

Almost as characteristic of the underground man as his “paradoxicalist” nature is his social isolation, which he calls an inability to “live life” (Dostoevsky 297, 296). The underground man’s relationships are generally characterized by a lack of empathy and a persecution complex, a propensity to think the worst about both himself and others. He wonders whether he alone out of his coworkers in the civil service acquaintances “fancied he was looked upon with aversion” (Dostoevsky 216). Compared to them, he regards himself as a “coward and a slave,” though at other times he thinks himself superior to all of them (217). Even at school, he says, he was taunted all around for his face and his “clumsy figure” (238).

More significantly, the underground man regards his servant Apollon as the “bane of [his] life, the curse laid upon [him] by Providence” (280). He believes that Apollon “despised [him] beyond all measure,” but only offers Apollon’s supposed pride in appearance and haughty air, his lisp, his habit of reading psalms behind a screen, and his quiet insistence that his wages be paid on time as proof of this (280-281).

Finally, the underground man is unable to recognize Liza’s concern for him as love. When she first enters his rooms, he thinks she has come simply to hear more “’fine sentiments,’” as he offered her in the brothel (Dostoevsky 293). When he finishes calling himself the worst of the worms on earth and berating her for coming to him, he finds it “a strange thing” that Liza realizes he is unhappy and begins to weep (291). Only after reflection does he realizes that she does this because she loves him. Only in a brief moment of recognition, according to Sacvan Bercovitch, is he able to temporarily break out of his ego trap (289). When this recognition strikes him, it causes immediately within him a counter-reaction of revulsion (Dostoevsky 291). This revulsion will cause him, in succession, to weep, to make love to her, and to thrust a five-rouble note into her hand, which she casts back into the room as she rushes out. Later, in explanation of this sequence of events, the underground man will say that he “was incapable of love, for…[to him] loving meant tyrannizing and showing [his] moral superiority” (293). “Even in [his] underground dreams,” he writes, “[he] did not imagine love except as a struggle,” beginning with hatred and ending with “moral subjugation” (293). The underground man considers defining love as “the right – freely given by the beloved object – to tyrannize over her” (293).

Lethcoe considers it likely that the underground man’s acquaintances do not in reality despise him. Rather, he is simply projecting his feelings of inferiority upon others (14). Paris writes that the underground man compensates for his lack of security and esteem by isolating himself, embracing a philosophy of “freedom, will, caprice,…[and] intellectual superiority” (513). He cannot create an adequate self-image and so “oscillates between feeling like a god and like a piece of dung” (514). As he says, “either to be a hero or to grovel in the mud – there was nothing between” (Dostoevsky 229).

By twenty-four, the underground man is in the civil service, his life “gloomy, ill-regulated, and as solitary as a savage” (Dostoevsky 215). In the service, he makes friends with no one, since he believes they all despise him, and so “buri[es] himself more and more in [his] hole” – the underground of the novel’s title (215). In that underground he remains until the decisive incident with Liza that haunts him “like an annoying tune,” eventually spurring him to write his confessions (214). That incident is significant because it is the final revelation of his own inability to live up to his philosophy, his retreat into the “everlasting spite” of the “crushed and ridiculous mouse,” the educated man of the nineteenth century (187).

Sacvan Bercovitch offers an accurate summation of the underground man’s character in the Notes. The novel, he says

describes the constant return to a central spiritual imbalance. The underground man says that he wants to break the ‘stone wall’ before him in order to ‘master reality.’ But his actions – as student and clerk – fetter him to a vicious circle of shame and revenge, and when, responding to Liza’s compassion, he obliquely sees the source of his malaise, he turns violently from his perception. His attempts at ‘self-liberation,’ therefore, draw him deeper into illusion, and in failing to ‘bind his disabling excitation,’ he succumbs finally to the attractions of Thanatos: the ‘dark cellar’ of isolation and inertia. (613, emphasis mine)

The “stone wall” which Bercovitch mentions is one of the central concepts in the underground man’s philosophy. According to Matlaw, it represents for him first “single-minded purpose, finality, all that is in keeping with the normal, stupid, average man” whom the underground man, in mockery of Rousseau, calls l’homme de la nature et de la verite (107). Later, it will grow to represent “natural science, the laws of nature…all that can be connected with rational theories of the nineteenth century” (107). It is associated in his thought with the “crystal palace,” which is “wall-like because it is deterministic and rational” (107). Like “twice two makes four,” it is an incontrovertible fact, at which one cannot stick out one’s tongue (Dostoevsky 210).

Paris writes that the underground man is so opposed to the theory of enlightened self-interest since it contains an element of compulsion (521); one cannot argue with reason, with “twice two makes four.” Morson amplifies this statement, saying that the impersonality of the laws of nature is the very thing that offends the underground man (473). The underground man’s protests are useless against the indifference of the laws of nature. His willingness to have “independent choice” whatever the cost is not an evidence of existential boldness so much as evidence of his neurosis (Dostoevsky 201). “The underground man,” according to Paris, “does not wish to be free so that he can fulfill his human potentialities. For him,” as the quintessential detached individual, “freedom is the goal of life, the highest fulfillment, and he is ready to embrace suffering, chaos, and destruction in order to have it” (521). The novel’s second section exists partially to prove this, since in it “all the characteristics of an anti-hero” are “expressly gathered” (296).

The underground man’s status as an anti-hero shows, therefore, that Notes from the Underground cannot be claimed as a prototypical existentialist novel. The underground man may create his own values, but he cannot act upon them. Rather, even when he wishes to become spiteful, he finds in himself “many, very many elements…absolutely opposite to that…positively swarming…and craving some outlet” (Dostoevsky 181). The underground man seeks something beyond the underground, but he cannot define what it is that he seeks. It is merely “something different” for which he is thirsting but cannot find (212). This statement by the underground man justifies Olga Meerson’s suggestion that, for Dostoevsky, the practice of existentialism “indicates the lack of that which is most precious and needed…rather than the heroic self-sufficiency of living on without it” (321). Certainly no one can say that the underground man holds himself up as a moral exemplar at the end of his narrative.

Works Cited

Bercovitch, Sacvan. “Dramatic Irony in Notes from the Underground.” The Slavic and
East European Journal 8.3 (Autumn, 1964): 284-291.

Coetzee, J. M. “Confession and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoevsky.”
Comparative Literature, Vol. 37, No. 3. (Summer, 1985):193-232.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Three Short Novels: Notes from the Underground. Garden City, NY:
Anchor Books, 1960.

Lethcoe, James. “Self-Deception in Dostoevskij's Notes from the Underground.” The
Slavic and East European Journal 10.1 (Spring, 1966): 9-21.

Matlaw, Ralph. “Structure and Integration in Notes from the Underground.” PMLA 73.1
(March 1958): 101-109.

Meerson, Olga. “Old Testament Lamentation in the Underground Man’s Monologue: A
Refutation of the Existentialist Reading of Notes from the Underground.” The Slavic and East European Journal, 36.3 (Autumn 1992): 317-322.

Morson, Gary Saul. “Paradoxical Dostoevsky.” The Slavic and East European Journal
43.3 (Autumn 1999): 471-494.

Paris, Bernard. “Notes from Underground: A Horneyan Analysis.” PMLA 88.3 (May
1973): 511-522.

Rosenshield, Gary. “The Fate of Dostoevskij's Underground Man: The Case for an Open
Ending.” The Slavic and East European Journal 28.3 (Autumn, 1984): 324-339.