Notes from Underground is about what remains of a man when he rejects reason, calculation, and utopia and has nothing to put in their place: a lucid, paralyzed narrator who defends the freedom to want whatever he wants and uses it, above all, to wound himself and others.
In Part One, the underground man argues that the calculation of interest does not exhaust man. For him, man needs "an independent will, whatever that independence may cost," even if that will harms him, and for this reason he refuses the Crystal Palace, the utopia in which everything would be calculated. He also says that suffering "is the only cause of consciousness."
In Part Two, the argument takes shape in three scenes of humiliation, and the book shows the cost of the thesis: the narrator knows what he feels, rehearses each gesture as if it were a scene from a book, and acts worse than the script. Liza, the young woman who listens to him, responds to what he feels and not to what he does, and that is what he cannot bear.
Before the text, Dostoevsky warns that the narrator is invented, but that people like him "not only can, but must exist in our society." The book then asks what happens when lucidity leads to no action.