The Underground Man: Dismantling the True Motives of a Lofty Protagonist

Through the chronicles of the lonesome and longing Underground Man, Fydor Dostoevsky artfully conveys for his audience the condition of humanity when lofty ideals and unattainable expectations prevent them from enjoying or contributing to society. Dostoevsky creates for his readers a character whose deceptive starvation for human interaction and longing for love may play on their emotions. The story, however, reveals that his motives and actions are far from upright, specifically in his relationship with a prostitute named Liza. While The Underground Man may appear trapped in a distorted longing for true community, his act of  presenting himself as a “salvation figure” for Liza and his betrayal of her and the romance she was enticed to believe in allow readers to realize that his intentions are not for love and harmony within a community or a romantic relationship, but intentions of power and domination over his fellow man. 

 The Underground Man, who serves as the main character and the narrator of the story, refers to himself as a sick and wicked man who has been living a life of darkness and discontentment after leaving his work in civil service (Dostoevsky 3, 4). He has come to this lowly and dismal state because of how he views the world. “The more conscious I was of the good and of all this ‘beautiful and lofty’,” he explains, “the deeper I kept sinking into my mire, and the more capable I was of getting completely stuck in it” (Dostoevsky 7). Essentially, The Underground Man admits that it is his seemingly unrealistic expectations for life and his perpetual disappointment with humanity in general that he feels the need to remove himself from society. Later in the book, readers discover that one of his core longings is to, in a sense, become above human nature. He desires to find ultimate fulfillment in knowledge, but he knows that “reason knows only what it has managed to learn...while human nature acts as a whole, with everything that is in it, consciously and unconsciously” (Dostoevsky 28). Because The Underground Man longs for what simple reasoning cannot give him, he justifies that this state of seclusion was his “most normal condition” and that eventually, he had “lost any wish to struggle against this blight” (Dostoevsky 7). What readers may gather from this is that The Underground Man realized that the state he was in—retracting from humanity and keeping only to himself— was unnatural, and he perhaps at one time felt the urge to fight against such a life. However, he surrenders himself to the idea that his philosophies and ideals are far too great for anyone to understand, and therefore, he should not concern himself with his fellow man. 

What readers may tend to pity about The Underground Man are his seemingly inconsistent feelings towards community with the outside world. While he maintains that he is above society because of his beliefs, he also seems starved for attention. We see proof of this in his encounter with the soldier in the tavern. During a fight at the tavern that The Underground Man is watching, a soldier takes him by the shoulder and moves him to the side. The Underground Man is immediately offended, stating “I could even have forgiven a beating, but I simply could not forgive his moving me and in the end not noticing me. Devil knows what I’d have given then for a real, more regular quarrel, more decent, more, so to speak, literary!” (Dostoevsky 49). Although this means of human interaction he seems to long for is distorted, readers still see that he does want some connection to the outside world, be it in the form of a quarrel or a literary discussion. In earlier passages, The Underground Man describes how shame and humiliation can be twisted into a false sense of pleasure, simply because one obtains an elementary degree of attention or pity from such shame (Dostoevsky 8). This gives way to the idea that perhaps the narrator's wish to quarrel or even physically fight with the soldier is actually a cry for community. While The Underground Man’s seemingly pathetic plea for attention may grab a reader’s pity, his true motives are dismantled in his interaction with the prostitute Liza.

The Underground Man’s encounter with Liza begins with him noticing how simple and kind-hearted she appeared, allowing readers to see that maybe he is craving a romantic encounter (Dostoevsky 86). Further into their relationship, readers may feel a sense of desperation and even kinship between the two when The Underground Man proclaims his devotion to Liza, stating, “I’d stay forever on my knees before you, I’d look upon you as my fiancée, and regard it as an honor. I wouldn’t dare think anything impure about you” (Dostoevsky 99). While it appears that Liza has perhaps begun to chip away at his discontent heart, their relationship takes a turn when he senses that he has “turned her soul over and broken her heart”, and that she is simply a game that fascinates him (Dostoevsky 103). From here, readers may begin to realize that The Underground Man’s motives are not for the love and companionship that comes with romance, but for a domination over Liza in hopes to further twist her reasoning to become modeled after his own. This idea is further confirmed when The Underground Man becomes angry at Liza, declaring that he both hated her and was deeply drawn to her in a single moment, and his true apathy towards the relationship with Liza is apparent when he attempts to pay her for her services as a prostitute (Dostoevsky 124, 126). Liza, who is described as having embraced him “rapturously and ardently” returns him the money, implying that despite his anger towards her and her own ideals that did not meet up to his, she truly loved him (Dostoevsky 124, 127). Audiences can confirm that the narrator’s true motives were not to find community nor love with the prostitute; he simply wished to establish his dominance over her.

Dostoevsky composes a complex character for his audience to grasp. The story teaches readers that people oftentimes search too hard for the good in a character, simply because we want them to be good. While The Underground Man maintains a prideful, aloof persona throughout the story, we feel sorry for him and convince ourselves that his relationship with Liza proves his desperation to redeem himself. Unfortunately, this does not seem to be the case with Dostoevsky’s Underground Man.