Notes from Underground Summary | Chapterly
Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky: A Complete Summary "I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man." Overview Notes from Underground (1864) is one of the most influential short novels ever written. In barely a hundred pages, Dostoevsky created a new kind of literary character, the Underground Man, and in doing so anticipated existentialism, psychoanalysis, and the entire modern tradition of the anti-hero. The unnamed narrator is a retired civil servant living in a dingy St. Petersburg apartment. He is bitter, contradictory, hyper-conscious, and paralyzed by self-awareness. His monologue, addressed directly to the reader, is an assault on the Enlightenment belief that human beings are rational creatures who will naturally choose what is in their best interest. The Underground Man insists that people are irrational, self-destructive, and perverse, and that they will choose suffering over happiness just to prove their freedom. The novella is divided into two parts: a philosophical rant and a series of humiliating autobiographical episodes that illustrate the rant's claims. Together, they form one of the most uncomfortable and revealing portraits of human consciousness in all of literature. Plot Summary Part I: "Underground" The Underground Man addresses the reader in...