The Underground Man
How Not to Be a Rebel
In Dostoevsky's novella Notes from Underground, the narrator, who is commonly referred to as the Underground Man, fails to see that genuine freedom requires self-responsibility, human connection, and independent judgment within a liberal society.
"The Scholar at the Lectern" by Rembrandt (1641)
“I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I think my liver is diseased.” So begins the first-person narration of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s anonymous Underground Man in a searing nineteenth-century novella that surgically dissects the hyperconscious psychology of someone opposed to utopian socialism, but who lacks any alternative philosophy such as classical liberalism. Notes from Underground may not rank among Dostoevsky’s best-known masterpieces, but, word-for-word, it illustrates the sources and consequences of self-loathing as masterfully as any piece of literature. The piece also illustrates the pitfalls of assuming that the only reaction to an unsatisfying culture is outright rejection of all rationality and the equation of freedom with destructive unpredictability.
The Underground Man (henceforth UM) has a reflexive need to convey his motivations to the reader while professing no concern for what the reader thinks. We see this paradox throughout his flashbacks about several incidents fifteen years prior to his narration. Is he an unreliable narrator? Almost certainly, though it may be impossible to decipher when he is being honest. “Neurotic” doesn’t begin to describe UM—he is George Costanza times a hundred.
Dostoevsky's authorial intent is a cautionary tale about how not to react to bad social and political ideas, but it’s doubtful he meant to suggest the adoption of classically liberal values as an alternative because he was a conservative. UM represents the atomistic individual that critics straw man as the epitome of liberalism. He has no friends, family, coherent belief system, or meaningful pursuits. He wallows in solipsistic grievance because every problem is someone else's fault. Freedom is decoupled from responsibility. Others have agency, UM does not . . . at least, he doesn’t think so. His default attitude is that society owes him something that he never deigned to make himself worthy of deserving. He is a tortured soul by choice, not that he would acknowledge this. His nihilism might well make him a popular anti-liberal influencer on social media were he around today. But what makes UM interesting is that he has a few excuses worth exploring once we hear his side of things.
Dependent Contempt
UM lets many people live rent-free in his mind and seems unwilling or unable to let things go. The slightest perceived insult risks becoming a multi-year grievance. This is reflected in three flashbacks he describes in Part 2 of the novella.
His default attitude is that society owes him something that he never deigned to make himself worthy of deserving. He is a tortured soul by choice, not that he would acknowledge this.
The first involves a loutish officer he encounters after a tavern brawl, who lifts UM to move him out of the way without even acknowledging his existence. He feels inferior to the officer but still craves to be seen as a social equal. UM stalks him daily in a crowded nearby park for the next two years. He tries not to give way when they approach each other, but each time they get close, UM steps aside in their game of “walking chicken.” He can’t abide being ignored by someone he considers beneath him. He even borrows money for an expensive coat so that he doesn’t appear in ragged clothes when the test of his self-respect transpires. Instead of shrugging off the tavern incident—or making it a funny story to tell—his ego is bruised to the point of obsession. Finally, one day he manages to hold his ground and they bump into each other, though the officer continues walking as if nothing happened. That’s good enough for UM. He has regained his social status in his own mind when nobody but him would notice or care about this obsession.
In the second anecdote, UM invites himself to a dinner party hosted by some of the old schoolmates he dislikes and held in honor of one named Zverkov. UM tells us about his contempt for them as uncultured, while his thoughts and actions otherwise display a craving for their recognition of his superior intellect and education. The acquaintances don’t want him to attend, which makes UM want to go even more.
The event is a disaster. UM plans to show up late so as not to look eager, but he ends up being the first to arrive at the restaurant because they moved the dinner back an hour without informing him. He gets drunk and proceeds to berate them for their stupidity and obsession with worldly success. He then paces nearby for several hours while they revel among themselves, barely acknowledging his tantrum.
The men head off to a brothel without inviting UM, but he follows them, bitter about being ignored by people he finds beneath his station. On the way, he harbors a self-destructive fantasy of avenging himself on Zverkov, even biting him, then being sent to a labor camp only to return fifteen years later, ragged and penniless, and “forgive” Zverkov by shooting in the air as if at a duel. UM is unable to find Zverkov at the brothel but is distracted by a young prostitute named Liza. They lay in the dark while UM decides to toy with her by sentimentally waxing poetic about the joys of marriage and family life. Liza says he sounds like a book. UM is outraged by her sarcasm, which he later realizes is feigned out of timidity, since she finds his words moving.
As revenge for the perceived slight, he launches into a detailed prediction of how she will lose her youth and health while remaining in debt bondage to her madam, never finding love, and dying on the frozen streets with nobody to remember she ever existed. His words torment Liza. Instead of perceiving his speech as sheer cruelty, Liza thinks he is trying to save her by warning about the path she is taking. Encouraged by his ability to elicit such a reaction, UM impulsively gives her his home address, an action he quickly regrets.
Days later, Liza arrives unexpectedly at UM’s squalid abode to find him berating his servant for demanding his overdue wages. UM is terrified that she sees him now for how he sees himself, a poor and spiteful nobody. He will never forgive her for this humiliating situation. He screams at her to leave, ranting that he doesn’t care what happens to her. Instead, Liza embraces him because she senses he is broken and miserable, that he has never felt a true human connection. She assumes he wants to escape his emotional pain, but UM knows that he will soon come to resent the power he thinks this gives her. He admits to us that he can’t see “love” in any other terms than zero-sum power and perceived moral superiority.
After Liza attempts emotional connection, UM asks her to leave while slipping a five-ruble note into her hands, reminding her of her position as a prostitute. UM sees she had placed the money on his table before leaving, a defiant and heartbreaking rejection of his cruelty. He runs after her, but quickly gives up, reminding himself that he would just end up resenting her if she forgave him.
Someone who thinks for himself and takes responsibility for his life is not so reliant on others’ opinions of him. The reader is welcome to wonder what is the matter with UM, and the remainder of this essay will suggest some reasons.
Hyperconsciousness
UM puts Hamlet to shame in terms of overthinking and not acting. Every interaction is a potential cause for second-guessing others’ motives and his own emotional responses. UM ruminates constantly, replaying the same minor grievances, obsessing out of all proportion to their mattering in a normal life. He rationalizes his inertia in contrast with the so-called “people of action,” who go about their lives unreflectively because they are stupid and accept their limitations as given. Limitations, such as laws of nature, are affronts to UM because they frustrate his desire to be free of them. He craves contradictions and contrasts, while everything comes to him in flashes rather than coherent thoughts. But overthinking is inefficient. It leaves him unable to identify relevant considerations because everything seems relevant, hence his endless random swings between contradictory beliefs and attitudes. UM thus can’t find closure in any train of thought.
UM also fits the profile of a vulnerable narcissist. He alternates between grandiose fantasies of superiority and intense secret feelings of inadequacy, often within seconds. He may sense he’s responsible for his problems but blames everyone else while projecting onto them his own passive-aggressiveness. As we saw with Liza, he admits that “love” to him means tyrannizing and demonstrating moral superiority. Other people are stupid and uneducated, naive and contented, while he is so cultured and intelligent that he must be condemned to suffer alone in a world he perceives more clearly than others. A throughline in the narrative, the thing UM most consistently claims about himself, is his superior intellect and cleverness. Books are better than reality, which isn’t necessarily bad, though in his case may remind us of those who prefer to live on social media rather than out in the embodied world. But he is ever tormented by the fact that the real world with its laws of nature doesn’t go away—it only intrudes on his fantasy of superiority.
UM describes the sustained groaning of a man with a toothache, embellished given his insistence on making his suffering everyone else’s business. UM’s own actions reflect this motivation. He revels in the masochistic pleasure of revealing his lowliness, coupled with a sadistic pleasure in disappointing others. Their disgust reflects the power he has over them. A person confident and comfortable with himself is not inclined to purposely treat others badly. However, UM constantly assumes others view him with contempt, which leads him to a self-fulfilling prophecy of contemptible behavior.
UM’s obsession with how others view him, his very self-consciousness, makes him act with performative chaos. He tries to avoid acting in ways he thinks others expect and thereby behaves spitefully, assuming the worst of everyone. He asserts the freedom to transcend social expectations, but the joke is on him. Acting differently for its own sake is itself a type of conformity rooted in defining oneself in opposition to what others do. True nonconformity is judging for oneself what to do, regardless of whether it’s similar to or different from others’ behavior. Nonconformity is less about the content and more about the reasons for one’s behavior. In theory, there could be a conformist society where everyone acted differently merely to not be like the others. Likewise, there could be a nonconformist society of people acting similarly because they all thought for themselves, on independent grounds, that a particular sort of life worked best. Of course, the most likely nonconformist society is one of deep diversity, such as a vibrant liberal society, a possibility that doesn’t appear evident to UM.
Against Determinism and Rationalist Utopias
If UM were merely a chaotic narcissist, we wouldn’t continue to discuss the novella today. The genius of Notes is that some entirely valid insights motivate the protagonist’s actions even if he makes poor use of them. First, UM finds no solace in causal determinism, the view that humans lack free will since all their actions are necessitated by prior events beyond their control. He feels this reduces man to a machine without individual vigor. But in rejecting determinism, he still feels indecisive and powerless to attain any lofty standards by his own will, so inertia reigns instead. For UM, freedom involves unpredictability and random swerves, but this overlooks how free will and rationality are compatible. For instance, putting forth effort to achieve the means to one’s ends requires free agency. To be intelligible, even predictable, is consistent with free will. So, what if the “people of action” he mocks are not only not stupid but instead realistic and disciplined, making the requisite effort to work for what they value rather than falling back on the excuse of inertia or indecisiveness? One suspects UM would envy such people for displaying the courage and determination he lacks.
Likewise, there could be a nonconformist society of people acting similarly because they all thought for themselves, on independent grounds, that a particular sort of life worked best.
UM is rightly critical of Platonic accounts of “akrasia” or “weak will” that claim people only harm themselves due to ignorance, that those with knowledge of the good necessarily act toward it. He argues against the claim that we can identify man’s true interests and calculate them—men would rather act by their own will, even if it’s self-destructive, than be Diderot’s mechanistic piano key or organ stop subject to causal necessity. UM contends that people value the process of living and acting on their desires more than they value the result, and they may be terrified of ever reaching some destination. Sometimes they even value suffering and destruction because these sharpen consciousness.
However we view this latter point, UM isn’t always off base. He also critiques constructivist rationalism. The assumption that all of men’s interests are calculable leads to the pipe dream of central planning, expert social control, and compliant followers. Here his clearest contemporary target is the utopian socialist Nikolay Chernyshevsky, author of the novel What Is to Be Done?. In Adam Smith’s terms, Chernyshevsky is a “man of system” who sees humankind as chess pieces to be manipulated in their own alleged best interests. (Perhaps it’s no surprise that the author was later admired by Lenin.) This may also partly explain UM’s contempt for the masses, whom he sees as collectivist sheep happy to work toward such a utopia rather than be vital if self-effacing individuals.
However, UM labors under the false dichotomy of the dutiful utopian citizen versus the nihilist. This false dichotomy overlooks how a classical liberal society allows, even rewards, the freedom of individuals to think and act by their own judgment.
Hayekian, Smithian, and Millian individualists can engage in discovery processes that bring about far better outcomes than central planners. The “spontaneous man of action” that UM scorns is precisely someone who would be stifled in a centrally-planned socialist utopia. Even a more whimsical person like UM may discover gaps between what people desire and what they have—without intending to make such discoveries. One can be an entrepreneur without aiming to be such. He is correct to question on what grounds the utopians assume that all men naturally pursue their objectively best interests, if such interests could even be identified. “Why be rational?” is a valid question; however, the correct response need not be “Don’t.” Likewise, one needn’t act crazily in attempts to prove that one has free will.
In an interesting bit of metatextual closure, Notes ends with an interjection by Dostoevsky himself after UM declares he won’t write anymore: “However, the ‘notes’ of this paradoxalist don’t end here. He couldn’t resist and kept on writing. But it also seems to us that we might as well stop here.” This may be an act of mercy for the reader, as it’s conceivable that UM would keep writing innumerable pages until death. Since his narration suggests no closure to any thought processes, one can imagine that there is no denouement to his pathological indecisiveness. He fears reaching any destination and so remains eternally underground.
A classically liberal society, unlike a socialist one, needn't punish the spiritual hermit. But this liberal society also doesn't let people off the hook if they decide not to avail themselves of the opportunities to be free together.