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.