Part One: The Underground
Both the author of the memoirs and the memoirs themselves are, of course, invented. Even so, people like the writer of such notes not only can, but must, exist in our society.
Explanation and analysis
Before the underground man opens his mouth, Dostoevsky places before the text a short note, signed as an observation by the author. The book has two parts, and the note presents the first, entitled "The Underground," as the place where this character presents himself, sets out his way of seeing things, and tries to explain why he has appeared among us. The second part will bring the notes proper, about events in his life.
The note makes two claims that seem to contradict each other. The author and the Notes are invented, but people like the writer of these notes not only can but must exist in society, given the circumstances in which it was formed. With this, Dostoevsky closes in advance the reading of the narrator as an exception or a clinical case, and places part of the account on the circumstances, that is, on the time and the milieu that shaped the character. The man is fiction, but the type is real, and the reader is warned that the portrait holds good beyond him.
The text supports two readings. It may be the author's caution, not wishing to be confused with an unpleasant narrator and preferring to make clear that he invented him. It may also be the thesis of the book, stated before the man speaks: what follows is the product of a society, and not only of a temperament, and that is why it matters to the reader.
I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I think my liver hurts.
Explanation and analysis
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I have not managed to become not only wicked, but not even anything at all: neither wicked, nor good, neither a scoundrel nor honest, neither a hero nor an insect.
Explanation and analysis
I swear, gentlemen, that having too much consciousness is a disease, a real and complete disease.
Explanation and analysis
the pleasure came precisely from the all too vivid consciousness of his own humiliation.
Explanation and analysis
There, in his disgusting, stinking underground, our offended, beaten, and mocked mouse at once plunges into a cold, venomous, and above all eternal rage.
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because twice two is mathematics. Just try to argue with it.
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Of course I won't butt my head against such a wall, if I really lack the strength to break it, but neither will I resign myself to it just because I have a stone wall before me and my strength has not been enough.
Explanation and analysis
As if to say: I annoy you, I tear at your hearts, I keep everyone in the house from sleeping. Very well, then do not sleep; feel, all of you, every minute, that my teeth ache.
Explanation and analysis
they, as a consequence of their limitation, take the nearest and secondary causes for the first ones, and thus convince themselves more quickly and more easily than others that they have found the unshakable foundation of their work, and then they calm down.
Explanation and analysis
His own will, voluntary and free, his own caprice, even the wildest, his fantasy, at times irritated to the point of madness: all of this is precisely that omitted advantage, the most advantageous of advantages, which fits into no classification and because of which all systems and theories fall to pieces and go to the devil.
Explanation and analysis
reason is only reason and satisfies only the rational faculty of man, whereas will is the manifestation of all of life, that is, of all human life, with reason and with all its itches. And although our life, in this manifestation, often ends up in some little filth, it is life, and not merely the extraction of a square root.
Explanation and analysis
he will convince himself that he is a man, and not a piano key!
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and twice two makes four is no longer life, gentlemen, but the beginning of death.
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suffering, after all, is the only cause of consciousness.
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You believe in a crystal edifice, eternally unshakable, that is, one that you cannot even stick your tongue out at in secret, nor make a fig in your pocket.
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Why was I made with these desires? Was I made only to arrive at the conclusion that my whole constitution is a deception? Is that the whole purpose? I do not believe it.
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In the end, gentlemen: it is better to do nothing! Better conscious inertia! So, long live the underground!
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Today snow is falling, almost wet, yellow, murky. [...] Then let it be a story apropos of wet snow.
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Part Two: Apropos of Wet Snow
that I am a fly before this whole world, a disgusting, useless fly, more intelligent, more developed, more noble than all of them, that is beyond dispute, but a fly that yields all the time to everyone, humiliated by everyone and offended by everyone.
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Either hero or mud, there was no middle ground. That, precisely, is what ruined me.
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But that was exactly why I was furious: I knew for certain that I would go; that I would go on purpose; and the more tactless, the more indecent it would be for me to go, the sooner I would go.
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Offended? Y-you! M-me! Know, dear sir, that you can never, under any circumstances, offend me!
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I even began to weep, though at that very moment I knew perfectly well that all of it came from Silvio and from Lermontov's Masquerade.
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You sound... as if you were speaking from a book.
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your name will vanish from the face of the earth, as if you had never existed or been born!
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I don't want to, I don't want to, I simply don't want to pay him his wages, I don't want to because I want it that way, because for that I have my lordly will.
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Know, then, that I am ashamed, and how ashamed I am; more than anything I dread it, even more than if I had stolen, because I am vain as if my skin had been torn off, and even the air hurts me.
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From all this she understood what a woman always understands first of all, if she truly loves: that I myself was unhappy.
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In the first place, I was no longer even capable of loving, because, I repeat, for me to love meant to tyrannize and to be morally superior.
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As for me, all I did was carry to the extreme, in my life, what you did not dare carry even halfway, and you even took your cowardice for prudence and consoled yourselves with it, deceiving yourselves.
Explanation and analysis
We are stillborn, and it has been a long time since we were born of living fathers, and this pleases us more and more. We are acquiring a taste for it. Before long we will invent being born from an idea.