I recently finished Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. Dostoevsky can breathe life into his characters like no other author. His characters usually embody an idea or an emotion. The narrator in Notes from Underground—let’s call him the underground man—is a perfect literary representation of bitterness.
The book starts with the underground man telling the reader “I am a sick man…I am a wicked man. An unattractive man”. The first few chapters are contradictory rants from the underground man who views himself as more intelligent than everyone else. He believes that it is because of this intelligence, that he is doomed to spend his life in solitude.
“It was not only that I could not become spiteful, I did not know how to become anything; neither spiteful nor kind, neither rascal nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect. Now, I am living out my life in my corner; taunting myself with the spiteful and the useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything”.
The underground man consciously—maybe even spitefully—decides to live his life in solitude. He views himself as a single intelligent man in a world of fools. He looks at the ground when passing people on the street—he obsesses on this act of cowardice but is unable to look strangers in the eye.
Even though the underground man looks down on humanity, he often tells the reader of his yearning to live. “Generally, I was always alone” the underground man tells the reader ” At home, to begin with, I mainly used to read. I wished to stifle with external sensations all that was ceaselessly boiling up inside me”.
The narrator lives in conflict with what he desires. “Oh, gentleman, perhaps I really regard myself as an intelligent man only because throughout my entire life I’ve never been able to start or finish anything.” This conflict is the cause of the underground mans bitterness.
The underground man is unable to do anything of importance. He is not respected by anyone. He is unloved. This in combination with his arrogance causes him to spend his days alone—boiling with bitterness and a hatred towards humanity.
The book is really just rants and justifications for the underground mans wasted life. The reader gets glimpses of the narrator’s desire for life throughout the book but it comes through most apparently in the last chapter.
“Because, for example, to tell long stories of how I defaulted on my life through moral corruption in a corner, through an insufficiency of milieu, through unaccustom to what is alive, and through vainglorious spite in the underground—is not interesting, by God; a novel needs a hero, and here there are purposely collected all the features for an antihero, and, in the first place, all this will produce a most unpleasant impression…We’ve even grown so unaccustomed that at times we feel a sort of loathing for real ‘living life’ and therefore cannot bear to be reminded of it. For we’ve reached a point where we regard real ‘living life’ almost as a labor, almost as service, and we all agree in ourselves that it’s better from a book.”
In a footnote, Dostoevsky alerts the reader that the narrator is not real, however, people like him exist. People like him have gone down very dark paths. Carl Panzram. The Columbine shooters. Ted Kaczynski.
Dostoevsky’s underground man is a fictional character. But his spirit of bitterness is very real. I know for myself, the thought that the majority of people are foolish, comes too easily. When watching my thoughts closely, I sometimes notice trains of thoughts similar to those of the underground man. I imagine most people can relate at some level to Dostoevsky’s solitary narrator. “Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer” wrote Dostoevsky “nothing is more difficult than to understand him”.
My Reading List: https://thesisyphusblog.wordpress.com/2020/07/05/sisyphus-reading-list-the-8-most-important-books-i-have-ever-read/
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