Notes from Underground, of 1864, can be read as the continuation of White Nights: the man from underground is the dreamer sixteen years later, another man of St. Petersburg who lives by reverie in a corner, now without tenderness. The two works do not have the same characters; what repeats is the type, the lonely man who describes himself and does not know how to live what he imagines.
In White Nights, the Dreamer already draws the portrait of this type. He describes the Petersburg dreamer, who settles in "an inaccessible corner" and "clings to his corner like a snail", and recounts the visit of an acquaintance who finds him disturbed, as if he had committed a crime within four walls, and who leaves laughing at him. The shame before the visitor and the life spent in a corner return in the book of 1864.
The difference lies in what each does with the chance of love. The Dreamer of 1848 receives that chance and loses it: he declares his love, is accepted for a few hours and, at the end, blesses the girl who left him. The man from underground receives a similar chance and refuses it. One ends in a blessing; the other, without the tenderness that saves the first.
Reading the two in sequence shows the path Dostoevsky took between one and the other, passing through the prison of 1849. Some see in the Dreamer the underground still in germ, with the same loneliness disguised as humour; and others see in him the opposite, a man still capable of gratitude, and for that reason far from the underground. The text of White Nights gives material for both readings.