Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground (1864) is a propulsive novella narrated in the first-person by the Underground Man, a retired civil servant.
The novel has two sections. The first section records the Underground Man’s rantings against various elements of Russian society, particularly Utopianism. People are incapable of perfection, he argues, and are fundamentally irrational. Human beings want freedom, not because they will use it rationally, but because they want to choose their fate individually, no matter how unreasonable their choices are. The second section details the Underground Man’s shameful interactions with his military colleagues and his encounter with a prostitute named Liza. The Underground Man finds himself incapable of loving someone, much less the skills to function in contemporary society.
The novella asks a crucial ethical question: if human beings are irrational, how can they do what is right? The Underground Man can identify the moral hypocrisy of his colleagues and Russian society in general. His own tortured notes come from his sense that he, too, is a hypocrite in that he cannot live the way he should. The novel’s theme is that it is far easier to preach ethical revival than act. What the Underground Man does to Liza is unconscionable. Yet she is willing to forgive him and extend love to him.
Experiments in Criticism 