Are you an Underground Man?

Review of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “Notes from Underground” (1864)

Some classics are classics because they’re good, and some are classics because they were loud enough to scare everyone into thinking they were important. Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864) is both. Brilliant and obnoxious. Necessary and insufferable. A book you should read not because you’ll like it (you won’t), but because its greasy fingerprints are still smeared across everything you think is modern.

This is the granddaddy of existential fiction. The Ur-text of whiny loners. The first major literary work to show that a protagonist doesn’t need to be noble, or brave, or even particularly functional—he just needs to be furious, verbose, and self-loathing.

And now I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the bitter and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot seriously become anything.

Notes from Underground is the scribbled notebook of a retired minor bureaucrat—unnamed, unloved, and very, very upset that you exist. He’s self-destructive, hyper-intelligent, and deeply bitter, sitting alone in his wretched St. Petersburg apartment, dissecting his own failures with surgical precision. He hates society, but he also craves its validation. He despises rationality, but he can’t stop analysing everything. He is, in short, what happens when self-awareness turns into a form of torture.

You see, gentlemen, reason is an excellent thing, there's no disputing that, but reason is only reason and satisfies only man's reasoning capacity.

The first half of the book is a philosophical kamikaze dive into every idea the 19th century held dear. Utilitarianism, rational egoism, the notion that man is a creature of reason and progress—obliterated. The Underground Man (as we’ve come to call him) howls into the void, and the void whimpers.

Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately in love with suffering.

The second half (“Apropos of the Wet Snow”) is a recollection of past events: he picks fights he can’t win, humiliates himself at a dinner party, and engages in a toxic, grotesque, romantic encounter with a young prostitute. He oscillates between cruelty and desperation, sabotaging himself at every turn, and by the end, you’re left staring at the wreckage of a man who has destroyed every possible connection out of sheer stubbornness.

I was lying when I said I was a contemptible man. I was just playing with words, out of boredom.

Except, of course, he is contemptible. And that’s what makes him so fascinating.

How can a man of consciousness have the slightest respect for himself?

Nietzsche loved him. Camus borrowed from him. And Sartre might as well have written Being and Nothingness with the Underground Man whispering in his ear. He is the spiritual grandfather of every tortured antihero from Dostoyevsky’s own Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment to Kafka’s Gregor Samsa in Metamorphosis.

I tell you solemnly, that I have many times tried to become an insect. But I was not equal even to that.

Dostoyevsky wrote this book in a particularly bleak year: his wife and brother had just died, and he was drowning in debt. So naturally, he decided to channel that pain into a fictional man who hates the world and himself equally.

The most infuriating narrator in literature

The Underground Man isn’t unreliable; he’s anti-reliable. He anticipates every criticism you might have of him and folds it into his bile. He’s a one-man comment section: combative, smug, wounded, brilliant, exhausting.

And yet—and here’s the real sleight of hand—you’ll recognise him. Not because you’ve met someone like him, but because you are, on some subterranean level, him. Every time you’ve sabotaged your own happiness, every time you’ve dwelt on an insult years after the fact, every time you’ve chosen misery over uncertainty, he’s there.

We sometimes choose absolute nonsense because in our foolishness we see in that nonsense the easiest means for attaining a supposed advantage.

It’s easy to forget, now that every other film school dropout is writing about alienation and fragmented identities, but Dostoyevsky got there first. He made despair into an aesthetic. He invented cringe. He looked into the abyss of human contradiction and didn’t flinch.

Oh, gentlemen, do you know, perhaps I consider myself an intelligent man, only because all my life I have been able neither to begin nor to finish anything. Granted I am a babbler, a harmless vexatious babbler, like all of us. But what is to be done if the direct and sole vocation of every intelligent man is babble, that is, the intentional pouring of water through a sieve?

The ideas in Notes aren’t tidy. They’re not meant to be. This is philosophy made of cigarette ash and undercooked meat. The Underground Man doesn’t believe in moral clarity, or social harmony, or that doing the right thing is even possible. He believes in consciousness as suffering, freedom as sabotage, and pain as the only authentic emotion.

You talk of vengeance, but perhaps I’d better let it fester. Why would I want to feel better?

That’s the ethos. The Underground Man would rather rot than reconcile. And Dostoyevsky is right there with him, sketching out the spiritual wreckage of modernity long before modernity had even unpacked its bags.

Let’s not forget the language. Even in translation—especially in the elegant beatings rendered by Pevear and Volokhonsky or the punchier versions from Michael R. Katz—Dostoyevsky’s prose here has the twitchy brilliance of a madman who’s also right.

The Underground Man doubles back, contradicts himself, interrupts his own sentences.

I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness- a real thorough-going illness.

He’s aware of his madness and uses that awareness to bludgeon you. He wants you uncomfortable. He wants you implicated. He doesn’t just break the fourth wall, he lights it on fire, accusing you of building it.

What might disappoint you

For a writer who could orchestrate moral drama with the thunderous clarity of a cathedral bell, Dostoyevsky fumbles in the narrative second half. The flashbacks feel padded. The encounters are overwritten. The climax, such as it is, lands with a dull thud instead of the intended existential gut punch.

Dostoyevsky clearly wants the long, miserable episode involving the prostitute to be tragic, revelatory, soul-shaking. It isn’t. It’s awkward. It’s laboured. It’s manipulative in the bad way, the way that makes you feel the author pulling strings instead of the characters collapsing under their own weight.

And yet, even here, the bile keeps bubbling. Even here, the Underground Man remains a singular literary achievement: a character so toxic he practically peels the glue off the pages.

It is clear to me now that, owing to my unbounded vanity and to the high standard I set for myself, I often looked at myself with furious discontent, which verged on loathing, and so I inwardly attributed the same feeling to everyone.

The Verdict: Rotten Genius

Notes from Underground is exhausting, infuriating, and at times, painfully relatable. The Underground Man might be an exaggerated mess, but his contradictions feel uncomfortably human. This is a book that asks whether self-awareness makes us free or just more precise in our own destruction. A book that throws a chair through the stained-glass window of Enlightenment thought and then dares you to clean it up.

The ideas burn. The character, unforgettable. The structure, lopsided. The pacing, awful. The emotional payoff, debatable at best. But it doesn’t matter. You read Notes from Underground not for satisfaction, but for the shriek of recognition it pulls from somewhere you didn’t want touched. It’s short, it’s ugly, and it’ll follow you for weeks.

In every man’s memories there are such things as he will reveal not to everyone, but perhaps only to friends. There are also such as he will reveal not even to friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. Then, finally, there are such as a man is afraid to reveal even to himself, and every decent man will have accumulated quite a few things of this sort. In fact, the more decent the man, the more of them he has stored up.

Read Next:

If you want more of Dostoyevsky’s existential torment, Crime and Punishment takes these ideas and expands them into a full novel.

Or, try Albert Camus’s The Fall if you want more elegant self-loathing; Vladimir Nabokov’s Despair if you like your madmen with better vocabulary; or Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf for a more mystical journey through inner torment. If you want a quiet, devastating alternative that hurts just as much without screaming in your face, go for Stoner by John Williams.

For non-fiction, try Erich Fromm’s The Fear of Freedom or Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil—both grim, both glorious. Or read I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter for a modern take on the fragmented, contradictory nature of the self.