He has gone underground by choice because he has no idea how to deal with life other than to sit on the sidelines with a sneer. He picks away at the sources of his discontent, the limitations of others and his own degeneracy, because, as he tells us, at least that reminds him that he’s alive. I hate, therefore I am. From that he can derive his definition of a human being: “a biped, ungrateful” (32). If we have to put some sort of label on him, he’s a nihilist, and Dostoevsky’s portrait invites us to recognize the foolishness in such a stance (on this point see Joseph Frank’s essay, which places the emphasis in the right place, although with too much special pleading about the context).
[It's interesting to note, in this respect, that many traditional heroes go underground retreating into madness or descending to Hades but with them the experience is a temporary stage, often a necessary one on their road to a fuller understanding (as with, say, Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Aeneas, or Dante). The point of the trip is to learn something to take back into the world, so that one can re-engage life more fully. In Dostoevsky's story the Underground is a refuge from the world, deliberately chosen as a permanent fort from which one can safely take pot shots at what lies beyond. This underground is a poorly furnished room in a poor district, with a door behind which the Underground Man can totally control his own environment. It functions as a protection against having to learn anything.]
Underground Man, however, does have one quality which, if it does not redeem him, at least indicates that he is not entirely subterranean: he still has not lost the desire to find some overall meaning to what he perceives as the cruel game of his life:
Oh, absurdity of absurdities! But how preferable it is to understand everything, to be aware of everything, of all impossibilities and stone walls, and yet refuse to reconcile yourself to a single one of those impossibilities and walls if it sickens you to submit to them; how preferable to reach, by the most irrefutable logical combinations, the most revolting conclusions on the eternal subject that you are somehow to blame even for the stone wall, though, again, it is entirely obvious that you are not to blame at all; and, in consequence of all that, to sink into voluptuous inertia, silently and impotently gritting your teeth and wallowing in the idea that, as it turns out, you don’t even have anyone to rail at; that you can’t find any object of blame and may never find one; that all this is some sort of sleight of hand, a sharper’s trick, a swindle, a plain mess in which it is impossible to tell who’s who or what’s what. And yet, despite all the uncertainties and confusions, you are still in pain, and the more uncertainty, the more pain!
. . . I’d gladly let my tongue be cut out altogether, from sheer gratitude, if things could be arranged in such a way that I myself would never have the wish to stick it out any more. What do I care if this is impossible to arrange, and we are expected to content ourselves with apartments? Why, then, was I endowed with such desires? Can it be that I was made this way simply so that I’d come to the conclusion that my whole way of being is nothing but a fraud? Can this be the sole purpose of it? I don’t believe it. (42)
In the context of this quality we can understand the delights he takes at times in his own pain, that curious strain of masochism running through his personality. It is hardly a moral sense, as Frank calls it (41), for it does not enable him to make any significant moral judgments. But it is something of an indication of a moral potential. He will, in the midst of his own confusion, degradation, and inertia try to hang onto some sense of himself, some sharply individualized feeling that he is still alive, still capable of being somebody and perhaps finding something. He has not entirely given up on his desires for fulfillment, even if he has no idea of what to do in order to make that remotely possible..
We know from Dostoevsky’s letters that this element in Underground Man’s personality was originally given more prominence in the story, for evidently the author provided more emphatic indications of how his fragmented consciousness might heal itself, specifically in a turn to Dostoevsky’s vision of Christianity. Inexplicably, the censors removed these passages, and Dostoevsky never put them back. Hence, we have little sense from the story as it is that Underground Man is going to find some form of redemption, even if we can see, in moments like the ones I mention above, a glimpse of the emotional foundations for such a change.
On the Occasion of Wet Snow
The second part of Notes from Underground takes us back twenty years, to a few incidents in the young life of Underground Man, told to us by the mature narrator. I don’t propose to review the details of this interesting story, but I would like to make some suggestions about links between these events and the mature personality we have met earlier.
One central issue in this story is Underground Man’s futile attempts to make contact with other human beings (something which the forty-year-old man has given up on, other than through his writing). At this stage in his life he has clearly not yet abandoned his ambitions to have some sort of social life. The fact that he fails miserably, both with his old school chums and with Liza, provides the most important indication as to why he has become the mature personality he is.
The reason is relatively easy to discern, at least its most obvious characteristics. Young Underground Man has what we would call a completely false consciousness or, drawing on our reading of Rousseau, he is so full of amour propre, that he is incapable of entering into the simplest social activity, a conversation with friends. To these encounters he brings such a strongly perverted ego, combined with a humiliating sense of how others see him, that his attempts to make contact defeat themselves.
For he is filled with a na ve Romantic sense of his own value, his superiority over others, and yet he cannot tolerate the thought that they might think ill of him. In other words, his Romantic assertiveness, largely derived from sentimental fictions,