“I am a sick man.... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me.”
The unnamed narrator begins his monologue with this sentence that immediately conveys the feelings of negativity, contradiction and ineptitude of his existence. Dostoevsky explores the intimate thoughts of the Underground Man, who is tormented by the Russian philosophy of the time and the ideals of a utopian society without pain and suffering. In the first part of the book, the Underground Man starts a decadent and, sometimes, self-mocking monologue on his personal philosophical views. He chastises himself by recognising that he is an intelligent human being anguished by the problem of ineptitude. He shows himself as naked to the eyes of the reader, authentic in his worst flaws and almost proud of them. In the second part of the book, the Underground Man decides to abandon, figuratively, the underground where he lived for more than twenty years and goes back to when he was still living his life in the “outside world” working as a civil servant in St. Petersburg. He narrates some episodes of his life memoirs where he got upset and made a mockery of himself looking for vendetta. His efforts to find a place in society had all failed, and he tells with no shame all the times he vented his anger against weaker and more isolated people than him.
Dostoevsky wrote this novella in 1864 and became famous for its self-examination perspective and the character of the antihero. Personally, I despised the Underground Man: he evoked sympathy and irritability at the same time for his way of approaching his life and ineptitude towards the problems. This reading is different from what I usually read: it does not have a strong plot, and I didn’t develop any attachment towards the main character. Nonetheless, this book is a milestone in the history of literature that must be read once in a lifetime.