A reading of “Notes from the Underground”
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In a damp, dark corner, with no light and no sound, a man with no name, no clear past, no future worth waiting for, begins to write his bitterest confessions:
“I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man… No, I am not kind.”
This is how Dostoevsky opens Notes from the Underground—not as an introduction to a story, but as a punch in the reader’s face. No prelude. No scene setting. No character exposition. Just a voice—muffled, sharp, warped with contempt and disappointment. It doesn’t sound like a hero’s voice. It sounds like the mind when it finally decides to hate itself.
Before Dostoevsky became the voice of psychological torment in The Brothers Karamazov, before the moral grandeur of Crime and Punishment—he was here.
In the underground.
Where sunlight is drained from the soul, and light is replaced with overconsciousness.
Here, man doesn’t hide his ugliness—he confesses it. He doesn’t apologize for it—he exposes it. Not as a savior, but as a tragic joke.
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The Underground is Not a Place… It’s a Hellish Consciousness
The “underground” in the novel isn’t a physical space. It’s a psychological-existential state—where faith collapses: in others, in the self, in morality, in logic.
The narrator doesn’t live underground because the world rejected him. He lives there because he rejected the world.
He chose the isolation—not out of fear, but out of disgust.
Outwardly, he’s a recluse. Inwardly, he’s at war—with every value, every law, every emotion.
Dostoevsky offers us not a hero—but a walking scandal. And he says:
“I am not a victim. But I hate myself the same way you hate yourselves… You’re just not brave enough to admit it.”
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Man: A Broken Being from the Start
In one of the most iconic passages, the narrator insists he’s not against reason because he doesn’t understand it—but because he understands it too well.
Modern rationality didn’t just want to think—it demanded to rule. Everything must be measured, calculated, governed by logic.
But what if man is, by nature, irrational?
What if he chooses pain, destruction, contradiction—not because he’s insane… but because he wants to be free?
The narrator mocks the “civilized man” who lives by rules, choosing good because it’s “rational.”
He doesn’t want logic—he wants choice.
Not comfort—but the power to reject comfort.
He wants to say:
“I choose ugliness, to prove that I exist.”
This is the peak of what we now call black ontology: man doesn’t seek meaning, he wrestles with his own inner absurdity.
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Consciousness as an Incurable Disease
Perhaps the key sentence in the novel is:
“Excessive consciousness is a disease.”
The man underground does not suffer from ignorance—he suffers from knowing.
He sees people’s true motives, the masks of morality, the lies of the self.
And he also sees he can’t do anything about it.
In this sense, he echoes what Camus would later say in The Myth of Sisyphus:
“Consciousness is the tragedy. To see, to understand, to grasp everything… and still be powerless to change it.”
It’s the pain of clarity.
A clarity so intense, it becomes blindness.
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Self-Destruction as a Form of Resistance
It may seem like the narrator is falling apart.
But beneath it all—he’s resisting.
Resisting what?
Conformity. Obedience. Becoming just another “functioning member of society.”
He tells his story of self-sabotage not to be pitied—but to prove he cannot be tamed.
Even when he meets “Liza,” the only woman who might’ve loved him, he crushes the moment with a chilling coldness—because he fears becoming an ordinary, decent, lovable human being.
He prefers the wound to the healing—because healing would return him to the herd.
And the narrator, like anyone obsessed with truth, would rather dwell in toxic solitude than engage in false connection.
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Does Man Truly Want Happiness?
One of the most haunting questions Dostoevsky raises—implicitly—is this:
Does man really want to be happy?
Or, deep down, does he love to suffer? Love to despise and be despised?
Not because these feelings are good—but because they’re real.
The narrator isn’t looking for comfort—he’s looking for truth.
Not salvation—but confession:
“This is me. Sick. Spiteful. So entangled in myself that I hate anyone who tries to get close.”
This opens the door to an entire school of thought—philosophical nihilism—where man isn’t driven by the will to live, but by the need to unearth what lies beneath life.
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Writing as a Weapon Against Silence
The narrator doesn’t speak to be heard.
He writes because silence is too heavy to bear.
And when he ends with:
“I haven’t finished speaking… and I won’t finish.”
—he hints that this kind of confession has no end.
Because the self is never settled. Because the pain never stops. Because the underground cannot be demolished.
In the end, Notes from the Underground is not a bleak story—it’s a provocation.
A demand to face your own internal monsters without makeup.
It’s not a story of a miserable man…
But of humanity—when it finally stops lying to itself.
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Conclusion: When Tragedy Becomes a Mirror
Ultimately, we don’t read Notes from the Underground to understand him—we read it to understand ourselves through our rejection of him.
We reject him because he speaks truth as it is.
We despise him because he resembles what we’re afraid we might be.
We laugh at him—not because he’s funny, but because he’s a mirror to our own fragility.
In a world that constantly tells you to be “positive,” “productive,” “purpose-driven,” Dostoevsky screams through his underground man:
“I am none of those things… and still, I write.”
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