Notes from the Underground chronicles the story of a man who has essentially separated himself from society in every way possible; this character, called the Underground Man, shares his thoughts and feelings with the reader throughout the text. Like many of Dostoyevsky's heroes, the Underground Man consistently expresses his discontent with society as a whole, continuously lamenting its ills and feeling severely detached and isolated (Dostoyevsky). The character of the Underground Man is full of self-loathing, and the reader becomes lost in his head: his logic, so shaped by this self-loathing, becomes twisted and self-affirming.
The character of the Underground Man is complex, however, because it does not appear that he wants to remain separate from society, although he reviles it regularly; he recognizes that his distaste and detachment from society has caused much of his self-loathing, but he is so overcome by apathy in the first section of the novel that he cannot break free from the cycle of unhappiness that he has locked himself into (Dostoyevsky). The Underground Man says of himself at one point: “‘I am a sick man I am a spiteful man. I am an unpleasant man. I think my liver is diseased. However, I don't know beans about my disease, and I am not sure what is bothering me. I don't treat it and never have, though I respect medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, let's say sufficiently so to respect medicine No, I refuse to treat it out of spite. You probably will not understand that. Well, but I understand it’” (Dostoyevsky). Rather than being particularly sympathetic, the Underground Man appears to the reader to be the victim of his own ego and his own unwillingness to act; his separation from society appears to be self-imposed rather than imposed by society. He is miserable and isolated, but he still seems to believe himself to be better than everyone around him; this makes him a decidedly unsympathetic character in many ways.
Dostoyevsky’s decision to set the novel in Saint Petersburg was a deliberate literary decision to underscore the mental anguish of the Underground Man. The Underground Man feels separate from society and everyone within it, and Saint Petersburg was, essentially, a city without a history: it was built to be the seat of power in Russia, and had no real cultural or historical ties to Russia itself. In the same way the Underground Man considered himself an anathema, so too was Saint Petersburg an outcast from the rest of Russia.
Russia, during the time when the novel is set, was in great political and social turmoil; the rule of the tsars was about to come to an end, and revolution and war was about to sweep the country, forever changing the face of the nation. The Underground Man represents the alienated and isolated people of Saint Petersburg; the people who were vastly unhappy with the ways in which the Russian government conducted affairs and treated the average citizen with excessive contempt.
The Underground Man as a symbol is interesting because as an individual, he is not sympathetic due to his ego, but taken as a symbol of the alienated and exhausted citizens of the new, “modern” Russia, he is a sympathetic character. Dostoyevsky was very concerned with what the changes in Russia were doing to the average citizen, and his examination of the Underground Man as a character is an extraordinarily effective method of looking at the cultural and social changes that Russia was facing.
Notes from the Underground was a groundbreaking novel because it addressed both the individual psyche and the larger social and cultural problems of Russia. As a novel, it provides wonderful historical insight into the cultural issues of modernization faced in Russia in the past, but the feelings of ennui that the Underground Man experiences remain applicable to the individual even today.
Works cited
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Notes from the underground. Champaign, Ill.: Project Gutenberg, n.d.. Online.
