Notes from the Underground

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Notes from Underground, also translated as Notes from the Underground or Letters from the Underworld, is an 1864 novella by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Notes is considered by many to be one of the first existentialist novels. It presents itself as an excerpt from the rambling memoirs of a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator (generally referred to by critics as the Underground Man) who is a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg.

The first part of the story is told in monologue form, or the underground man's diary, and attacks emerging Western philosophy, especially Nikolay Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done?. The second part of the book is called " propos of the Wet Snow", and describes certain events that, it seems, are destroying and sometimes renewing the underground man, who acts as a first person, unreliable narrator and anti-hero.

The novel is divided into two parts.

Part 1: "Underground" Serving as an introduction into the perplexing mind of the narrator, this part is split into nine chapters. The introduction to these chapters propounds a number of riddles whose meanings are further developed as the narration continues. Chapters two, three, and four, deal with suffering and the irrational pleasure of suffering. Chapters five and six discuss the moral and intellectual fluctuation the narrator feels, along with his conscious insecurities regarding "inertia"- inaction. Chapters seven through nine cover theories of reason and logic, closing with the last two chapters as a summary and transition into Part 2.

The second part is the actual story and consists of three main segments that lead to a furthering of the Underground Man's consciousness.

The first is his obsession with an officer who frequently passes by him on the street, seemingly without noticing his existence. He sees the officer on the street and thinks of ways to take revenge, eventually borrowing money to buy a higher class overcoat and bumping into the officer to assert his equality. To the Underground Man's surprise however, the officer does not seem to notice that it even happened. The second segment is a going away dinner party with some old school friends to bid Zverkov, one of their number, goodbye as he is being transferred out of the city. The concluding sentences recall some of the themes explored in the first part, and the work as a whole ends with a note from the author that while there was more to the text, "it seems that we may stop here."

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