Symbols

The Stone Wall The stone wall is the image with which the underground man names the limit that the laws of nature, the conclusions of the natural sciences and mathematics set to man. Before it, the man of action yields with sincerity and calms down, because the wall seems... The Crystal Palace The Crystal Palace is the utopia that the underground man attributes to the "gentlemen" he addresses: a future in which men's desires have been calculated, their acts recorded in a table, and economic relations fixed with mathematical exactness, and in which... The Piano Key The piano key, together with its counterpart, the pin of a mechanical organ's cylinder, is the image of a man reduced to a mechanical part, whose acts are played from outside by the laws of nature. The underground man uses it to say what man would be if there... The Mouse The mouse is the figure with which the underground man describes the man of hypertrophied consciousness: born of a retort and not from the bosom of nature, he yields before the man of action to the point of considering himself a mouse. Offended, he wants... The Wet Snow Wet snow is the weather of Part Two and gives it its name. Halfway between snow and water, yellow and murky, it is the precipitation that the underground man sees falling at the end of Part One and that decides what he is going to tell: an old memory that... The Clothes and the Beaver Collar Clothing is the measure the underground man uses, in Part Two, to weigh his own dignity before others. Three items carry it: the collar of the greatcoat, which he swaps from raccoon to beaver so that he can bump into an officer as an equal; the yellow stain...