Summary of the part
Part One has no plot: it is a monologue. The underground man, forty years old, a former clerk with no name, writes in Petersburg to "gentlemen" he himself invents, and what happens across the eleven sections is that he argues, portrays himself, and contradicts himself. The motive he gives on the very first page is anger, and the reason he gives for speaking is that talking about oneself is what a decent man likes best. The note that Dostoevsky placed before the text opens the reading:
Analysis
И автор записок и самые «Записки», разумеется, вымышлены. Тем не менее такие лица, как сочинитель таких записок, не только могут, но даже должны существовать в нашем обществе
, Both the author of the notes and the notes themselves are, of course, invented. Even so, people like the author of such notes not only can, but even must, exist in our society.
Dostoevsky warns, before the man speaks, that he is invented and that, even so, the society that formed him produces people like him. In this way he closes off in advance the reading of the narrator as an exception or a clinical case, and places part of the blame on circumstances. Two readings: the author's caution toward whoever would confuse the two, or the thesis of the book stated before the man opens his mouth.
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Chapter I: The Sick Man Who Refuses Treatment
Chapter summary
The underground man opens the text with the diagnosis he makes of himself, before saying anything else:
Analysis
Chapter II: Consciousness Is an Illness, and It Gives Pleasure
Chapter summary
The underground man promises to explain why he could not even become an insect, and the answer comes without detour: he has too much consciousness. Ordinary consciousness would have sufficed, that of straightforward men of action, and his misfortune is to be educated and to live in Petersburg, which he describes as the most abstract and premeditated city on the globe.
Analysis
Chapter III: The Mouse and the Stone Wall
Chapter summary
The chapter sets two types side by side. The straightforward man of action, when the feeling of revenge takes hold of him, charges like a raging bull, head lowered, and only a wall stops him, before which he yields sincerely, because the wall seems to him a solution that reassures. The underground man feels for him an Envy that reaches the point of bile: he is stupid, he concedes, but perhaps the normal man must indeed be stupid, and perhaps that is beautiful. The antithesis is the man of hypertrophied consciousness, born of a retort and not from the bosom of nature, who yields before the other to the point of considering himself a mouse:
Analysis
Chapter IV: The Groans of Toothache
Chapter summary
An imaginary interlocutor laughs: after that, you, sir, would find pleasure even in toothache. The underground man replies that he would, and that he knows it from experience, from a month of aching teeth: the person does not rage in silence, he groans, and the groan is not sincere, it is spiteful, and everything lies in that spite.
Analysis
Chapter V: No First Cause, Only Inertia
Chapter summary
The chapter continues the question that closed the previous one: can someone who sought pleasure even in the feeling of his own humiliation respect himself? The underground man says that he never could bear to apologize to his father and promise not to do it again, not out of incapacity, but from being too capable: the regret, the tears, and the vows of renewal were a deception of himself, though without pretense, and a minute later he already saw them as a disgusting lie. Why did he mistreat himself like that? Out of boredom, he answers: it was tedious to sit with his arms folded.
Analysis
Chapter VI: The Dream of Being Lazy
Chapter summary
The shortest chapter is a fantasy in the conditional. The underground man says that if at least he did nothing out of laziness, he would respect himself: he would be defined in a positive way, there would be something to say about him, and being lazy would be a title, a career, with a seat in the first of the clubs. He gives the example of an acquaintance who prided himself all his life on understanding Lafite wine and died with a conscience not only at peace, but triumphant.
Analysis
Chapter VII: The Advantage Nobody Computes
Chapter summary
The underground man dismisses the reverie of the previous chapter as golden dreams and goes on the attack: who was the first to declare that man does evil only out of ignorance of his real interests, and that it would be enough to instruct him so that he sees the good as his own advantage? He answers with history: there are millions of facts about men who, understanding their advantages, set them aside and took a difficult and absurd path, out of obstinacy and caprice, and for them obstinacy was more agreeable than any advantage. And he asks whether human advantages have been computed with exactness: the statisticians' record (well-being, wealth, liberty, tranquility) leaves out an advantage that fits into no classification.
He gives the example of a friend, a "collective person", who sets out with clarity and emotion how one should act by the laws of reason and of truth and, fifteen minutes later, without any outside pretext, does the opposite, moved by something inside him stronger than all his interests. The beautiful systems that promise to make man kind and noble by showing him his interests are, in his view, mere logistics, comparable to Buckle's thesis that civilization softens man and makes him less bloodthirsty. He answers with the century itself: blood in rivers, as merry as champagne, Napoleon, North America, Schleswig-Holstein.
Analysis
Chapter VIII: The Piano Key and Caprice
Chapter summary
An interlocutor interrupts, laughing: that will does not even exist, science has already dissected man and knows that free will is nothing. The underground man says that he was going to say the same and was frightened by it, and he takes the hypothesis to its end: if someday the formula of all our wills is found, man will stop willing, for what pleasure is there in willing by proxy?
Analysis
Chapter IX: Twice Two Makes Five, and Suffering
Chapter summary
The underground man says he jokes while grinding his teeth, and goes on to ask the "gentlemen": how do they know that man must be remade and that his will needs to be corrected? He grants that man is a creative animal, condemned to open paths, and asks why he also loves, even to the point of passion, destruction and chaos. His hypothesis:
Analysis
Chapter X: The Crystal Palace and the Henhouse
Chapter summary
The underground man returns to the edifice that the "gentlemen" promise, and says that perhaps he fears it precisely because it is of crystal and eternally unshakable:
Analysis
Chapter XI: Conscious Inertia and the Plan to Write
Chapter summary
The chapter opens with the conclusion that the monologue seemed to call for. The underground man says that, in the end, it is better to do nothing:
Analysis
Reading of the Part
Analysis