Summary The narrator wishes that he could simply say that he is a sluggard or that he is lazy. This would at least be a quality and he could then be positively defined as “a sluggard.” He says that he once knew a man who prided himself on being a […]
Read more Summary and Analysis Part 1: Section 6Summary and Analysis Part 1: Section 5
Summary Continuing with his question, the narrator wonders if a man who takes pleasure from degradation can ever respect himself? And where does respect enter into emotion? Many times, he says, he has simply pretended to be offended, but as he relives the situation, he comes to the point of […]
Read more Summary and Analysis Part 1: Section 5Summary and Analysis Part 1: Section 4
Summary The Underground Man maintains that there is even some type of enjoyment in a toothache. For example, why does a person moan with a toothache? If he did not find enjoyment in moaning, he would not moan. First of all, the moaning represents the intellect’s inability to understand the […]
Read more Summary and Analysis Part 1: Section 4Summary and Analysis Part 1: Section 3
Summary The direct man (or the man of action) is often possessed by feelings of revenge and may carry out that revenge quickly and effectively. Such a man is, of course, stupid, but he does act whereas the man of acute consciousness can never carry out any revenge. Instead, like […]
Read more Summary and Analysis Part 1: Section 3Summary and Analysis Part 1: Section 2
Summary The narrator tells us why he could not become an insect even though he has wished many times to become one. He is too acutely conscious, which, he says, is a real “thorough-going illness.” The flaw in any cultivated man is that he possesses a higher level of consciousness […]
Read more Summary and Analysis Part 1: Section 2Summary and Analysis Part 1: Section 1
Summary The narrator immediately reveals that he is a sick, spiteful, and unattractive man who believes that his liver is diseased. He refuses to consult a doctor about his liver, out of spite, even though he knows that he is hurting only himself by his spite. He is now forty […]
Read more Summary and Analysis Part 1: Section 1Summary and Analysis Part 1: The Footnote
Summary In a footnote, Dostoevsky asserts that while the diary and the narrator are imaginary, such a person as the narrator not only exists, but that he must exist because he represents many people who are forced by the circumstances of society to live, as he does, underground. Analysis Dostoevsky’s […]
Read more Summary and Analysis Part 1: The FootnoteCharacter List
The Underground Man The unnamed paradoxical narrator of the story who is addressing an imaginary audience. Liza The prostitute whom the Underground Man befriended and then cruelly rejected. Anton Antonich Syetochkin The Underground Man’s immediate superior from whom he borrowed money and whom he visited when he needed to “embrace […]
Read more Character ListAbout Notes from Underground
Notes from Underground is perhaps Dostoevsky’s most difficult work to read, but it also functions as an introduction to his greater novels later in his career. The ideas expressed in Notes from Underground become central to all of Dostoevsky’s later novels, and therefore this work can be studied as an […]
Read more About Notes from UndergroundBook Summary
The narrator introduces himself as a man who lives underground and refers to himself as a spiteful person whose every act is dictated by his spitefulness. Then he suddenly admits that he is not really spiteful, because he finds it is impossible to be anything — he can’t be spiteful […]
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