Action and Inaction

The Theme in the Work

Action and inaction in the work hold a question inside them: why is the man who understands best what he does the one who does least? The underground man answers in two ways. In Part One he gives the explanation: consciousness produces inertia. In Part Two he shows the result: what he does is always smaller, later or more crooked than what he had planned.

Already in ch. I of Part One he defines himself by what he has not managed to be, and draws a consolation from it: the intelligent man cannot seriously become anything, and only the fool becomes something.

In ch. III of Part One he sets himself against the man of action, who advances like a bull with lowered horns and, on meeting the wall, calms down, and says he envies him. The logical explanation comes in ch. V of Part One: the man of action mistakes the immediate cause for the first, and so acts and calms down; he does not make that swap, because each first cause drags behind it another.

In ch. VI of Part One he imagines the opposite: if at least he did nothing out of laziness, he would have a positive definition, a title and a career. Ch. XI of Part One closes with the result, which he announces and then contradicts in the following paragraph.

Part Two puts inaction on stage. In ch. I of Part Two a bump, prepared by years of hatred and much rehearsal, is resolved with eyes closed, at the last second, in a move the officer pretends not to have felt. In ch. II of Part Two he tells that between hero and mud there was no middle ground, and that in the mud he consoled himself by thinking that at other times he was a hero.

In ch. IV of Part Two he walks for three hours around the room to prove that he gets along without his colleagues, and in ch. V of Part Two he rehearses the slap, the duel and the final pardon and does not manage to carry out anything: the empty house saves him from the act, and he confesses that he would have given it. The same repeats in ch. VIII of Part Two: he spends three days waiting for Liza, thinks of going to her house to ask her not to come, and does not go. In ch. X of Part Two he runs after her and stops at the corner, wondering whether he would hate her tomorrow precisely for having kissed her feet today. The pattern is always the same: the imagined act defeats the executed one, and what he executes is the half that spares him from executing the rest.

What the work does with action, then, is show it as excess or as lack of cause. The explanation of Part One, the cause that drags another cause, survives intact in Part Two: there is no scene in which he acts with the assurance of a man of action. The close of ch. X of Part Two, in which he says he carried to the extreme what readers do halfway, returns the question to the reader.

Who Embodies It

The underground man, in act and in theory. Trudolyubov and the officer of the billiard room, at the other pole: the men of action, untroubled about their own place, whom he envies and despises. Apollon, who barely does his work and decides every clash through silence, and Liza, who acts without a plan, in the embrace and in the banknote, and places the narrator before an action he did not write.

Where It Appears

• Part One, ch. I: The underground man says that an intelligent man cannot seriously become anything, and that only the fool becomes something.
• Part One, ch. III: The underground man envies the man of action, who advances like a bull with lowered horns until he reaches the stone wall and there calms down, and compares himself to a mouse.
• Part One, ch. V: The underground man asserts that the direct fruit of consciousness is inertia, the state of consciously folded arms, while men of action take proximate causes for first ones.
• Part One, ch. VI: The underground man imagines that being an idler would be a title and a career, and that he would thus have a positive definition and could respect himself.
• Part One, ch. XI: The underground man concludes loudly that it is better to do nothing, better conscious inertia, and in the next paragraph takes back what he said.
• Part Two, ch. I: The underground man spends a long time preparing the bump with the officer, gives up the night before, and ends up bumping shoulder to shoulder with eyes closed.
• Part Two, ch. II: The underground man says there was no middle ground between hero and mud, and that in the mud he consoled himself remembering that at other times he was a hero.
• Part Two, ch. V: The underground man rehearses in the sledge the slap, the duel and the final pardon, and is saved by chance when he finds the house empty.
• Part Two, ch. VIII: The underground man spends three days waiting for Liza and thinks of going to her house to ask her not to come, but does not go.
• Part Two, ch. X: The underground man runs after Liza to throw himself at her feet, stops at the corner of the deserted street, and wonders whether he would hate her tomorrow for that.

Where the Readings Diverge

The inaction in the work can be read in two ways. On one reading, it is the logical consequence of consciousness: the man who sees the cause of the cause cannot begin, and inertia is the price of lucidity. On the other, what paralyzes him is fear of the outcome. Joseph Frank, who reads the text as satire, allows us to see the paralysis as the point where the two ideologies the narrator carries to their final consequences, the utilitarian of Part One and the romantic of Part Two, destroy themselves from within.

The text gives reason to the first in almost every chapter, and to the second in ch. IX of Part One, where the narrator says that twice two is four is the beginning of death because after it there is nothing left to do. The place where the two readings meet is the corner of ch. X of Part Two: he stops because he sees what the act would cost, and the text does not say whether what weighs is lucidity or the fear of what would come after.