I would say that Notes from Underground is a psychological medical record, which very accurately describes the psychological dilemma I am facing as a modern person. In this book, the protagonist doesn’t even have a name, only a code name – the Underground Man. In his forties, he was a retired civil servant who lived in the basement and talked to the readers. There is no ups and downs in the plot, no heroic adventure, and there is only a “sick, malicious and unpleasant” man who spreads out all his dirty, dark and contradictory ideas.
The triple dilemma of the Underground Man
1. Inferiority and conceit: He feels ugly, poor, incompetent and annoying, and at the same time, he feels that he is more sober and real than those “normal people”.
2. Desire and push away: He is extremely afraid of loneliness and eager to be recognized, but whenever someone approaches, he will push the other person away with irony and malice.
3. Rationality and willfulness: He knows what is beneficial to him, but he does the opposite, just to prove that he is not a machine that calculates interests, but a person with free will.
Do you feel… a little familiar?
Is it absurd? But who hasn’t done such a thing that “can’t get along with ourselves”?
In contemporary life, you can see the shadow of the Underground Man everywhere: you know that you should go to bed early, but you have to use your mobile phone until the early morning. You can relax the relationship by apologizing, but you can’t open your neck. You obviously care about a person, but you say the opposite and push people away. You feel that you are not good enough, but you secretly feel that you are much better than those who follow the flow. These are the states of the people in the basement. He is not a madman, but a naked human heart who has not been disciplined by society. The great thing about this book is that it shows us the inner folds that people never dare to admit and even dare not think about.
Mockery of “normal people”
The author wrote this book in 1864, which refuted the popular theory called “rational selfishness” in the Russian thought community, a theory that as long as people calculate their interests clearly, they will automatically become better and happier. He said through the words of the Underground Man:
“No, people are complicated. People will choose pain for freedom; for resistance, they will choose destruction; in order to prove that ‘I am not a machine’, they will deliberately do things that are harmful to themselves.
And this idea is the core concept of existentialism later. Jean-Paul Sartre’s “people are sentenced to be free”, and Albert Camus pushing stones written by Camus are actually repeating the sentence that the Underground Man shouted more than a hundred years ago: I don’t want to be counted clearly, I don’t want to be arranged, I would rather be a painful free man than a happy calculator. And the most heartbreaking thing is that those “normal people” don’t care about him at all. There is no audience for his resistance, and no one knows his pain. He punched into the air, and there was no echo. Everyone who opens this book can hear their own echo in the underground.
One experience to see through yourself
Reading this book will not make people happy, but there will be a magical relief. Because you will find that I’m not the only one who is so screwed. It turns out that my contradictory, inexplicable and knowingly committed behavior was clearly written 160 years ago. In the dark basement, a person’s craziest and most honest torture of human nature, sober to the bone and painful to the extreme, will make you understand why people sometimes prefer to stay in the underground.
This book is not a dark book that teaches people to fall. It is a mirror that illuminates the unwillingness to compromise and powerlessness to change in everyone’s heart. It is not to make you like your book, but to make you accept the contradictory, less decent, but true to the bone. After reading it and returning to the ground, you may not have a better life, but you will live a more real life.
