Notes from Underground

The last chapter of Part I opens with what sounds like a conclusion: the long and short of it is that conscious inertia is best. Hurrah for underground! — and then, three lines later: "Oh, but even now I am lying! I know myself that it is not underground that is better, but something different, quite different, for which I am thirsting, but which I cannot find! Damn underground!" He goes further. It would be better if he believed anything of what he has just written. He swears there is not one word — not one — that he really believes. Or rather: he believes it, perhaps, but at the same time feels and suspects he is lying like a cobbler. Then comes the chapter's most extraordinary passage. He imagines what the reader would say to him — and the imagined indictment is devastating. You thirst for life and try to settle its problems with a logical tangle. Your sallies are insolent and yet you are in continual alarm. You talk nonsense and are pleased with it. You say impudent things and immediately apologise. You declare you fear nothing while trying to ingratiate yourself. You gnash your teeth and try to be witty. Your witticisms are not witty, but you are satisfied with their literary value. You have no respect for your own suffering. You have sincerity but no modesty — out of the pettiest vanity you expose your sincerity to publicity and ignominy. You hide your last word through fear, having only cowardly impudence. You boast of consciousness, but your heart is darkened and corrupt, and you cannot have a full, genuine consciousness without a pure heart. "Lies, lies, lies!" Then the turn: "Of course I have myself made up all the things you say. That, too, is from underground. I have been for forty years listening to you through a crack under the floor. I have invented them myself, there was nothing else I could invent." He raises a question about who he is even writing for — confessions like these are never printed or given to others to read. But a fancy has occurred to him and he wants to realise it. He lays out a taxonomy: every man has reminiscences he'd tell friends, others he'd tell only himself, and others he fears to tell even himself. The more decent a man, the more of this last category he possesses. He wants to test whether one can be perfectly open even with oneself — not take fright at the whole truth. On autobiography: Heine said a true autobiography is almost impossible, that man is bound to lie about himself — Rousseau certainly lied in his Confessions, even intentionally, out of vanity. He writes only for himself. The reader form is a convenience, nothing more. He will never have readers. Why write rather than simply remember? Writing is more imposing. He can criticise himself, improve his style. And one memory in particular has been haunting him for days — like an annoying tune he cannot shake — and he believes writing it down might free him. Besides: he is bored, and never has anything to do. "Writing will be a sort of work. They say work makes man kind-hearted and honest. Well, here is a chance for me, anyway." Snow is falling today, yellow and dingy. He thinks it is the wet snow that has reminded him of the incident he cannot shake off. And so let it be a story à propos of the falling snow. Part II begins.