Pride

The Theme in the Work

The work's pride goes by the name the narrator gives it, vanity, and takes the form of a flayed skin, as he himself says. The underground man measures each scene by who saw him and how, and Part Two is a sequence of three occasions on which he exposes himself to be seen and comes out wounded. What moves him is not to conquer anything: it is not to be left out.

In Part One the trait is already there, in theoretical tone. In ch. II of Part One he confesses that he is susceptible like a hunchback or a dwarf, and that there would be moments when even a slap in the face would give him the joy of despair. In ch. VI of Part One he dreams of being an idler, because that would give him a positive definition and he could respect himself. In ch. X of Part One he refuses to take the chicken coop for a palace, out of gratitude, and the refusal can be read as dignity or as vanity: he accepts the shelter, not the title.

Part Two begins with the wound. In ch. I of Part Two, what he does not forgive the officer in the billiard room is not the gesture; it is having been moved aside without being noticed.

And he gives the reason for having kept silent there, which is not the one one would expect.

The officer will never know of the plan, and so the revenge is a monologue: years of hatred, much preparation, a new collar (The Coat and the Beaver Collar) and a collision with eyes closed. In ch. III of Part Two pride has its origin at school, orphaned and mocked, when he shut himself into a frightened, wounded and excessive pride, and in the same chapter he goes to dinner precisely because it is inconvenient to go. In ch. IV of Part Two he walks for three hours around the room to show that he gets along without his colleagues, and when at last he asks Zverkov's pardon, he receives the answer that disarms him.

Zverkov denies that any offense is possible, and the narrator, who asserts himself only as offended or as offender, is left without a place. In ch. V of Part Two, on entering the house, he is pleased that the girl will see him as repulsive.

In ch. VIII of Part Two, after the letter of apology to Simonov, the pride of Apollon, who does not ask for his wages, confronts the master's, who does not pay them, and the master's gives way first. The highest point comes in ch. IX of Part Two, when he shouts at Liza what pride is, a flayed skin.

And in ch. X of Part Two the close turns into an accusation against the reader: he carried to the extreme what others do not dare carry even halfway.

The narrator's pride, then, is neither arrogance nor humility. It is the point where lucidity and wound cross, and the names he gives himself, mouse, fly, coward, slave, are the same wound said from within (The Mouse).

Who Embodies It

The underground man, who makes pride the measure of every scene. Zverkov, who does not have that wound and so disarms him; Apollon, whose silent pride defeats the master's; Ferfichkin, who plays with the most touchy honor and is, according to the narrator, a coward within; and Liza, whose dignity appears when she shows the medical student's letter (ch. VII of Part Two) and when she begins to rise, offended, in ch. IX of Part Two.

Where It Appears

• Part Two, ch. I: The underground man does not forgive the officer who moves him out of the way in the billiard room without noticing him, and says he cowered there out of boundless vanity.
• Part Two, ch. I: The underground man spends a long time preparing a shoulder-to-shoulder collision with the officer on Nevsky, trades the collar of his overcoat for a beaver one, and wins with his eyes shut.
• Part Two, ch. III: The underground man invites himself to Zverkov's farewell dinner, certain that he will defeat everyone at once, and his colleagues welcome him coldly.
• Part Two, ch. III: The underground man recounts that at school, an orphan and mocked, he shut himself into a frightened, wounded and excessive pride, and that he studied as well as he could to escape the jibes.
• Part Two, ch. IV: The underground man walks from table to stove for three hours to show that he gets along well without his colleagues, and understands that humbling himself this way could not be more voluntary.
• Part Two, ch. IV: Zverkov answers the underground man's plea for pardon by saying he can never offend him, and the underground man decides that either everyone will beg his friendship on their knees or he will slap Zverkov.
• Part Two, ch. VIII: The underground man writes Simonov a gentleman's letter that lies about the drinking and strikes a tone that suggests he regards everything with independence.
• Part Two, ch. IX: The underground man shouts at Liza that he is more ashamed of poverty than of theft, because he is vain as if his skin had been torn off.
• Part Two, ch. X: The underground man says he carried to the extreme what readers do not dare carry even halfway, and that they take their cowardice for prudence.

Where the Readings Diverge

The narrator's pride can be read in two ways. On one reading it is the symptom of a man who, because he is lucid, cannot bear what he sees in himself and answers humiliation with a greater humiliation. On the other, it is the vanity of the type Dostoevsky satirizes: the Russian romantic who understands everything, yields to everything and busies himself with practical advantage, a theme the narrator himself develops in ch. I of Part Two. Joseph Frank reads Part Two as a parody of the social romanticism of the 1840s.

What the two readings cannot separate is vanity and lucidity. The narrator knows that each of his gestures is useless and performs it anyway, and the phrase in which he credits himself with a courage the others lack is the same one that shows a man who, in order to exist, needs someone to see him. That is why none of the scenes gives him back what he seeks: the attention he does get always comes as an offense.