‘Notes from the Underground’: On Isolation, Self-Deception and Spite
A review of ‘Notes from the Underground’, by Fyodor Dostoevsky; Digireads.com, 2006.
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground is an unsettling little book. It envelops its readers in the cramped, uncomfortable psyche of an unnamed narrator whose disdain for himself and the world is plain from the start. Published in 1864, the novella is a far-sighted psychological study that foreshadows existentialism and psychoanalysis, laying bare the corrosive effect of isolation, the paralysing nature of overthinking, and the perverse pleasure one can take in suffering. This ‘Underground Man’, as scholars have come to call him, lives in self-imposed exile in a small, grim flat. He is scornful of society, unable to connect with it, pouring his thoughts into a narrative container that can barely hold them. Often he contradicts himself. He revels in his own torment.
The novella opens in a defiant key. It veils the narrator’s bitter inner-directedness. ‘I am a sick man … I am a spiteful man,’ he says, as if clinging pridefully to his flaws is also to assert his uniqueness. But his identity, born of deliberate isolation and self-loathing, is only a prison from which he can do little but shake his fist at the heavens and damn the ruling mood of his time. He attacks the naïveté of ‘the rational man’, scorning the notion that human choice can be boiled down to cause and effect, and denouncing Enlightenment faith in reason and progress. Human improvement is impossible, he says: people are driven by irrational whims and primitive instincts. For the Underground Man, to be human is to be contradictory, self-destructive, even wilfully spiteful — traits he treasures, yet loathes, in himself.
He attacks the naïveté of ‘the rational man’, scorning the notion that human choice can be boiled down cause and effect.
The story that follows is split into two. Each is distinct in shape and tone. The first is a monologue, even a soliloquy, in which the Underground Man veers between rage and resignation; it serves as a lengthy prelude to his theories. He describes his discontent with everything, from science to society to love. He denounces optimism with fervour. His tone is feverish, his ideas unwinding from his mind so quickly they get tangled together. He borders on incoherence, insisting on his freedom yet paralysed by thought. The Underground Man presents himself as one who is wholly aware of his own failings, but unwilling to change them. He savours his pettiness, and his grievances against the world building up like rust in his consciousness, hardening his habits of thought.
In the second half, the narrative takes a more formal shape. The Underground Man recounts events from his life that reveal the depth of his pain and extremes of his alienation. This is not to say he is objective. What is on the face of it a retelling of his life is charged with feeling, particularly contempt. He disdains a former schoolmate; and then Liza, a young sex worker whom he tried to shame yet to whom he was drawn in a tortured, sadistic need for validation. Unlike the Underground Man, Liza was innocent, and carried within herself the potential for change. Yet rather than let her lift him up through genuine connection, he sought to bring her down into his world of misery. His remembered interactions with her betray his twisted need to make himself loathsome. He swings violently here between cruelty and a need to be understood.
The novella’s concern with loneliness is reflected in its dreary, isolated setting, which serves as an extension of the Underground Man’s mind. The squalid, dimly lit room in which he lives is a physical manifestation of his inner life, which is just as cramped and stagnant: a kind of purgatory where he wallows in bitterness and self-pity. His world is grey, damp and unyielding, trapping him in his malaise. He languishes in the dim twilight of his existence, too proud to seek connection yet too weak to sustain his isolation without anguish. Through Notes from the Underground, Dostoevsky explores individualism, the possibility of improvement, the pain of separation, and the power of self-deception with a skill that has preserved the story’s relevance through time. One is tempted here to say something about modern life. We are absorbed in our phones, addicted to convenience; we aim to construct identity from scratch. We are apt to attack our culture to boost our self-esteem. Should I go on? We are all at risk, it seems, of becoming Underground Men; perhaps it is a perennial risk.
Through Notes from the Underground, Dostoevsky explores the extremes of individualism, the pain of separation, and the power of self-deception.
And we are, on the data, thoroughly miserable. The Underground Man’s torment is ceaseless but also timeless, reflecting our impulse to stand apart from the group and cast judgement on it. We cannot bring ourselves to humbly open up to the warmth and kindness of others, to accept our common humanity. Better that we affirm our independence, even if we live in anguish. Dostoevsky’s prose, dense and at times convoluted, mirrors the narrator’s own muddled thoughts, challenging us to confront the discomfort of seeing ourselves in a mind as troubled and tangled as the Underground Man’s.
Notes from the Underground is, in the end, a study in ego and existential inertia. It is a plunge into the mind of one who rejects happiness yet yearns for it, who fears vulnerability yet longs to be understood. It is as much a mirror as it is a cautionary tale, causing us to question our motives, our rationalisations, our perceived cleverness, and the black depths of our own ‘underground’. Through this this rich and unsettling portrait, which has all the bleakness of a painting by Max Ernst or George Grosz, Dostoevsky has left us something that is both repellent and magnetic, enormously prescient, a major work of literary psychology and a testament to his genius at laying bare the human soul.
