Notes From The Undergroun

Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s – Notes From The Underground
  Study Guide  
Chapter Summaries   Part 1 Chapter 1: Dostoevsky immediately introduces us into the mind of his forty-year-old Underground Man, who describes himself as a "sick", "spiteful", "most unpleasant man" with a liver disease for which he refuses to seek treatment "out of spite." Throughout the man's speech, he addresses a formal audience he calls "distinguished gentleman"-more out of sarcasm than respect.   He is also a man who cannot act as others do. Though he hates this spiteful part of him, this inability to "become anything," he does, however, take some kind of pride (though also shame) in the fact that he is superior in intelligence to those around him. He takes great pains to explain that because he is so intelligent, he is unable to act. He will elaborate on this point in future chapters.   Part 1 Chapter 2: In this chapter we learn that the UM's illness is more than physical: he asserts that he has a psychological disease-he has too much consciousness. He admits that day after day he would rush home to hide in his "corner," only to anguish and "gnaw" at himself, reconsidering the actions he had taken that day. At the same time, however, he finds a kind of pleasure in the humiliation and even despair caused by this "overly acute consciousness."   Part 1 Chapter 3: The UM now uses an analogy to make his point. He describes the normal, "stupid" person as an enraged bull rushing headlong into a wall at the slightest impulse. He likens himself, one who possesses a hyperconsciousness, to a mouse-the antithesis of a normal man, he says. While the bull acts on its rather simple mental reasoning, the mouse cannot act because its overly sophisticated mental processes perpetually plague it with doubt and vacillation, rendering him unable to do anything, save "creep ignominiously back into its mousehole." This hole, this underground, is the home of the UM and those like him.   At the end of the chapter, the UM...