I am a sick man. … I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me.
This is how the great Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky begins his somewhat peculiar novel Notes from the underground. I dealing with this work shouldn’t be considered as a writer’s in duty bound confession concerning his source of inspiration or point of departure for his way of thinking. It should rather be considered as a service to the reader, a contextual point of reference. Perhaps the texts of an alleged underground man of today will be slightly more comprehendible with reference to the original underground man’s thoughts. Why it’s also important to explain the term "underground Man", the origin of it in this in 1864 published script and the train of thought that is in the term inherent.
The quantity of Notes from the underground is fairly modest in comparison to the thick bricks that Dostoevsky has managed to produce. The number of pages is only slightly over 150. But therefore believing it to be easier or less profound is highly deceitful. By no means is it so. On the contrary is it intellectually a very billowing text. In form and language many of the elements that we gullibly have come to grow accustomed to in our automatic readings are here explored and put to test.
One of the tings that make the novel difficult to penetrate is a persistent use of what might be called logic of negations. The narrator’s voice is over and over negating earlier given propositions, constantly contradicting himself. But in some strange paradoxical way he still manages to complete what seemingly isn’t supposed to be able to complete. This strategic grip occurs in the first of the two parts, the most challenging and interesting one. Its content, presented as a long monologue, is a piece of intellectual warfare aimed towards a society’s ideal founded on probability calculus and the assumption of the merely rationally human thinking and behaviour. The underground Man, the protagonist in The notes, protests against this: “Good heavens, gentlemen, what sort of free will is left when we come to tabulation and arithmetic, when it will all be a case of twice two make four? Twice two makes four without my will. As if free will meant that!”
Behind the fully rational the disarmed free will is trying to make itself heard amongst this clatter of mathematical calculated truths: “I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.” In this the logic of negations idiom becomes congenial with the underground man’s objection. The effect of the logic of negations will also be a means of an end; waking an intellectually dozed off reader who in blind faith puts his trust in rational consistency. The written text’s rhetorical construction, that mimics the logic’s, where two premises are expected to be followed by a conclusion, is in The notes constantly counteracted. With the use of the logic of negations the automatization of the text is forced to capitulation making the assumption of the human rationality suffer a serious defeat. That’s also why he freely and easily can let utterances that others would have erased remain uncorrected and contrary (casually within parenthesis) admit his mistake: “(A poor jest, but I will not scratch it out. I wrote it thinking it would sound very witty; but now that I have seen myself that I only wanted to show off in a despicable way – I will not scratch it out on purpose!)”
The underground man describes himself as sick, spiteful and unattractive, how come? Among all the lies, paradoxes and contradictions we might find a possible clue: “But yet I am firmly persuaded that a great deal of consciousness, every sort of consciousness in fact, is a disease.” Instead of like Prince Myshkin, that appears later on in Dostoevsky’s authorship, disclose the folly of the surroundings by living and throughout depicting an example of the good, degraded hopefully to wake pity or sympathy, the underground man appears to be this ideal’s antithesis. The underground man is an antihero, he chooses the dark underground refuge before taking part of the fraudulently above ground that persistently maintain the complete rationality, freedom and equality but has grown solid within the rational caste system with serious lack of freedom. He is resigned, dejected and close to indifferent to the collective folly that surrounds him, very well aware of that among them rather he is considered to be the fool. But he accepts, welcomes and adopts this external point of view. He dreads not and he gives no apology. That’s why he can maintain his claim of being sick, spiteful and unattractive.
In the second part of the novel, which in form is more of a conventional prose, the underground man’s point of view gets its concretizations in the depiction of an episode that still, twenty years later, keeps tormenting his mind. In this the underground man stands out as a under no circumstances sympathetic person. The episode describes among other things how he invites himself to attend a farewell party in the honour of an acquaintance. Actually he can’t really afford with such an extravagant event and he holds none of the party members to be anything but repugnant. Still against better knowing he reluctantly prompts of attending and for his sake the event degenerates into an extremely devastating and embarrassing experience that anyone else would have done anything possible to repress from once memory. But not the underground man. He rolls himself in suffering, shame and dishonour.
Why does the underground man remain underground, of own accord locked out of the world around him, rolling himself in suffering, shame and dishonour? Psychological motives put aside he does it as a manifestation over the free and independent will! Because “suffering means doubt, negation” and “why, suffering is the sole origin of consciousness”. And this, the underground man maintains, is “infinitely superior to twice two makes four”. “The long and the short of it is, gentlemen, that it is better to do nothing! Better conscious inertia! And so hurrah for underground!” But this statement is immediately followed by an admission. Once again he is lying. It is not underground that is better “but something quite different, for which I am thirsting, but which I cannot find! Damn Underground!”
But where the Underground Man in Dostoevsky’s version finds sanctuary in his underground the modern Underground Man has no such possibilities. Supervised constantly, always afraid of the revelation there is no rest, no tranquillity. Today’s society is all-embracing. There is no escape. The only place of refuge is the place within. Only there he is in full freedom to love, live and think as he was created. He was born with too much of a conscience, too much of a consciousness. This of course cannot be allowed.
The underground man holds suffering and the internal dissension to be the origin of consciousness. I’m not so sure though. I much rather tend to consider failure and negation the principles behind a conscious thinking. But what am I saying? Readers are advised to disregard the former statement; I’m surely mistaking!
Should you feel a need of a deeper study of Dostoevsky's Notes from the underground , theise links are highly recommended:
http://www.gradesaver.com/ClassicNotes/Titles/underground/
