Where Am I to Get a Second? I Have No Friends.

In Part One, the underground man explains that he is a man of acute consciousness. He overthinks and overplans and usually ends up just making people angry because the decisions he ultimately chooses are poor ones. He decides to go to the dinner party where no one likes him and ends up insulted and low. After the dinner party, he is consumed by thoughts of revenge and plans out a whole encounter in his head. “I’ll pull Olympia’s hair, pull Zverkov’s ears!” the underground man declares. Such feelings mirror what he felt after his encounter with the officer. Just like with the officer, the underground man lets the dinner party eat at him and depress him. However, because of his acute consciousness, nothing really can be done. He stews and envisions violence but cannot act on his thoughts because he is not a man of action. Instead of facing Zverkov and his friends, the underground man visits a brothel and has an odd conversation about love, marriage, and children with a prostitute. The underground man thinks that one can be happy in marriage, especially if the marriage is born from love. He also states that he would be jealous of any man a daughter of his married. “I should be jealous, I really should. To think that she should kiss anyone else!” His thoughts on marriage surprise me; the note about daughters does not. From what he had written about in Part One, I would not have thought that the underground man was one who believed in happiness from love. He seems to only believe in pain. Because of his vanity, though, it would make sense that he would be jealous of his daughters’ husbands. He wants to think that someone can only love him, and no one else.

Every Sort of Consciousness, in Fact, is a Disease.

The narrator in “Notes from Underground” is spiteful, odd, and tedious. He talks for a while about his past as a “spiteful officer” who “was rude and took pleasure in being so,” only to later retract his statement as a lie. “I was lying from spite,” he explains. Such switches of truth and untruth grow tedious to the reader. He goes on to say that he was a weak officer, tormented to the point of retreating from society, and now he lives out his days underground. He seems to hate the world, for “it is only the fool who becomes anything,” and he is not a fool. Despite his spite and the odd handling of his problems, he claims to be a decent man and assures the reader that if they “bring him a doll to play with… maybe he should be appeased.” However, the narrator takes pleasure in his pain and seems quite beyond appeasement. He wallows in self-pity and enjoys each moment of painful movement. He let the poor condition of his life eat at him until “at last the bitterness turned into a sort of shameful accursed sweetness, and at last— into positive real enjoyment!” His pain and eventual enjoyment is caused by all that is “sublime and beautiful,” so it seems our narrator will never be content. He also appears to believe that change cannot happen, and so one is not to blame if one is a bad person. One cannot stop or alter one’s bad thoughts and so must be forgiven for being bad. “One was not only unable to change but could do absolutely nothing. Thus it would follow, as the result of acute consciousness, that one is not to blame in being a scoundrel.” Earlier he states, “I did not know how to become anything,” so his philosophy on change seems to only be an accommodation for himself and his own inability to grow and change.