The metaphor of the ‘underground’
First analysis post in while! :D So I’ve been reading Notes From Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky and have been really interested in the metaphor of the underground he portrays through the entirety of the text. Notes From Underground is actually not the only book this metaphor comes up in, he brings this up in multiple of his works. This leads me to think that Fyodor may have thought of himself as the underground man he talks about in his works, he projects his feelings of qualifying as a bad person onto his characters.
The undergroundling is, in his first embodiment, preeminently a man-worm, the common denominator of humanity. He is like everyone else, his only motive is to be ‘original’, that is, of his terrible burden of nonentity. He is ‘characterless’ because he does not “know how to become anything: neither spiteful nor kind, neither a rascal nor an honest man.” He is a ‘mouse’ of a man, “There in its nasty, stinking, underground home our insulted, crushed and ridiculed mouse promptly becomes absorbed in cold, malignant and, above all, everlasting spite.”
The underground man is poor and dirty. He is crushed by economic and social forces, for he has no position and is the object of a universal contempt, which drives him into his lonely attic or compels him to wander feverishly. This absolute degradation of ugliness, awkwardness and poverty nourishes the seed of revolt in the particular resentment of the undergroundling.
The ‘vicious’ actions of the undergroundling (narrator) are due to the fact that he will do anything to become ‘something’, rather than zero. Even if that includes turning himself into an unsatisfactory person. The narrator enjoys being rude because it causes other people to be upset, he likes that he can control their emotions with such trivial conversations
His deepest despair comes when he is ignored in his advances when he cannot even achieve being a nuisance. He is incapable of making himself sufficiently obnoxious, an effective obstacle, he is not capable of even being struck or cursed out of irritation; that itself would bring him joy.
To battle the guilt he feels for acting so awful, as a way to get rid of his sense of uselessness, the narrator will often say other people are lesser than him. He is the superior being as he has the gift of higher conscience, however, this gift is also a curse. “Oh, gentlemen, 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.” The Underground man makes this statement after having described the causes and conditions of his inertia (the tendency to do nothing or to remain unchanged. His state of unchangingness and his excuses for being that way could be explained by Newton’s 1st law of motion. He is Justifying his ‘bad’ conscience by stating that unless something or someone comes along and hits him his current state of pessimism will not and cannot change). Just prior to this point in the novel, he has asserted that his intelligence is the cause of his inertia; now he suggests that his inertia is evidence of his intelligence. This reversal demonstrates the Underground Man’s belief that intelligence, or consciousness, must cause inertia and indecision in the modern era.