The underground man is the nameless narrator: a former civil servant of forty who writes from a corner of St. Petersburg and who, before saying anything else, presents himself by his defects. The first sentence is "I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man."
He says he was a Collegiate Assessor, a middling rank in the imperial civil service, a post that served only to give him something to eat; he inherited six thousand rubles from a distant relative and retired at once. He lives in a bad room on the outskirts, with an old maid servant, and knows that the city's climate harms him and that living there is expensive for what he has, and yet he stays. He writes for "gentlemen" whom he himself invents and disavows at the end.
Right after calling himself wicked, he disavows his own introduction: he has lied, and he has never managed to be anything, "neither wicked, nor good, neither a scoundrel, nor honest, neither a hero, nor an insect." Part Two shows him at twenty-four, solitary and proud, repeating in deeds what the first part argues.
Before he speaks, Dostoevsky warns that the character is invented, but that people like him exist. For this reason the underground man is read at once as an individual and as a type, and the title that names him, without a proper name, points to the second.