Notes From the Underground
Fyodor Dostoevsky(1864)
Extract
I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man.
A spiteful, toothache-ridden clerk in St. Petersburg declares that twice two makes five, that a palace of crystal is a henhouse, and that the whole of rational civilization is an affront to the perversity of the human will. Dostoevsky published this strange, venomous novella in 1864, and in doing so he detonated something beneath the foundations of Enlightenment thought. The Underground Man is not a character so much as a confession dragged into the light: petty, brilliant, self-lacerating, and terrifyingly recognizable. He refuses every consolation. He sabotages his own happiness with surgical precision. In his ranting, Dostoevsky found the voice of modern consciousness itself, free and wretched in its freedom.
If you loved this
Camus's Meursault lives the alienation the Underground Man only theorises about.
Kafka makes the Underground Man's self-loathing physical: he wakes up as the insect he already felt like.
Hamsun's starving narrator circles the same obsessive consciousness, but on the streets of Christiania instead of underground.