Underground such as fate, freedom, and suffering were discussed first in The House of the Dead

In Notes from Underground, the anti-heroic character of the underground man who struggles in his “dead house” in the underground symbolically connects with the peasant convicts portrayed as heroes in The House of the Dead. In both works, the isolated ones are granted chance to fulfill sacrificial love, a Christian ideal that

Dostoevsky personally acquired in prison, by overcoming ill-will and learning how to see the other. Yet, unlike Aleksandr Petrovitch, who accomplished moral restoration and spiritual transformation granting him freedom by loving the other, the

underground man rejected the opportunity to fulfill selfless love in his relationship with Liza. This anti-hero was left to suffer forever in his loveless underground, his Petersburg dead house from which he could never resurrect himself.

The Symbolic Nature of Underground in Notes from Underground

Notes from Underground is a novella considered to be one of the great works by

Dostoevsky whose creative period begins with the composition of this novella (Frank 2010: 383). As the title indicates, the narrative separates itself from its face value for it is from the underground. The conflict-ridden notes highlight the undefined,

referential, fluctuating quality of the term “underground” as a symbol of great potentials. By featuring it as a prominent symbol of deep meaning in the work,

Dostoevsky cast a doubtful glance at the Western European philosophical influence in the 1860s, a time when Russian intellectual society was rife with pervasive naïve rationalism as responses to the ideological transition taking place in the West. By exploiting the feature of the underground, Dostoevsky satirized the extravagant

emphasis on logic, reason, and rationality placed by the “educated” Russian social and intellectual elites who adopted this Western European ideology at its face value.

In Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky showcased his keen penetration into man’s existence, morality, and psychology by featuring the underground as a symbol comprised of layers to reflect the social-ideological issues of his time. As a symbol, the underground displays the inevitable suffering of an ambivalent consciousness reoriented by Western enlightenment. It saturates the whole work with a sense of loneliness, gloominess, and inactiveness while reflecting the ambivalent narrator, the abstract environment, and the disoriented life with its non-concrete, variable, and complex quality. The symbol not only denotes man’s disintegrating being in this artificial world, a bigger underground, but also indicates his perpetual struggling as a way to suffer in an unsettled, disjointed, and unbalanced inner-world.

The underground also suggests a strong sense of confinement reflected in the form

of the narrative as a loop without a concluding end, insinuating the continuous

“impasse” (Fanger 183) endured by the underground man who “is able to comprehend but not to resolve,” as Donald Fanger (1965) argued in Dostoevsky and Romantic

Realism. The enclosed narrative formed by illogical confessions was designed to echo

the self-inflicted incarceration “by the will of a man…in the service of an idea” (182) and to expose the “psychological complexity” (180) of a dreamer’s frustrated mind.

The underground man revisits his past in Part Two and justifies his self-banishment in the underground in Part One; the reverse sequence of the narrative highlights the contradictory but encompassing feature of his telling. By confessing, he dominates both parts of the story; the whole work reverberates with his continuously speaking voice. Seen in this light, the confession made by the anti-hero in the underground not only imprisons him but confines the reader with his relentless telling.

Also, the idea of struggle serves as a key point to interpret the underground as a symbol. Robert L. Jackson (1981) argued in Dostoevsky’s Underground Man in

Russian Literature, the idea of “inescapable suffering of man” serves as “the

foundation for the conception of the ‘underground’” (29). The underground man’s chaotic struggle results from “a loss of equilibrium” (29) between individual and society, between inner world and outer world, and between fantasy and reality. The drastic imbalance is the root of his suffering, the cause of his spitefulness, and the reason bringing him to the underground. The imbalance struggled by the perceptive narrator skillfully reflects the ambiguity not merely of his mind but of the intellectual awareness influenced by Western European ideology that governed cultural

atmosphere of 1840s St Petersburg; as a symbol mastered by Dostoevsky, it acutely directs the attention to the paradoxical side of the Western ideology in an ironic manner.

For the underground man who was gnawed by the daunting environment heavily influenced by the ideology relying on logic and rationality, the underground is his reliable indoor shelter separating him from the “inauthentic” world outside. According to Frank, the underground bears a fundamental quality as “an alternative ideal” which values “the autonomy of the will and the freedom of the personality” instead of appealing to “reason and self-interest” in accord with the laws of nature (Frank 2010:

426). The underground plays the role of the anti-hero’s final retreat after years of ordeal caused by the dissonance between an irrational individual and a rational society.

Only in the underground can the underground man gain absolute freedom and full autonomy to exert self-will. In this shelter, this man of hyperconsciousness finds comfort, obtains pleasure, and performs according to his inclination without fulfilling his moral responsibility as the idealist approach to attain freedom in living.

The whole work adopts a retrospective point of view, revisiting the underground man’s past and presenting numerous happenings to delineate this anti-hero’s troubled existence. Expressed by the confessional notes from the underground are physical confinement, mental disorder, social estrangement, and spiritual disintegration. A wide range of reference exemplified by “the underground” will be divided into parts supported by four symbols here in the following. St Petersburg, moan, fly, and snow are the four to be analyzed in symbolic terms assisting “the underground” on physical, psychological, social, and spiritual levels.

The Physical Aspect of the Underground: St Petersburg The underground is a closed, isolated, and tyrannical universe resembling a

Siberian prison; however, the underground prison hardly bears any components to be

a microcosm of an ideal universe or a domain for spiritual revival. In Notes from

Underground, the narrative presents the symbolic features of St Petersburg by

employing its harsh, dull, and distinct nature to resonate with the underground, a hellish, dingy, and separate world in which the underground man inhabits. This “most abstract and intentional city on the entire globe” (Dostoevsky 1864: 7) as termed by the underground man incorporates a distinct atmosphere due to its non-concrete feature as a man-made capital. To historicize, St Petersburg used to be a swamp built by serfs into a seaport city in accordance with the will of Peter the Great, who

determined to make it the window onto the West in the 18^th century. Its origin holds an unnatural distinctiveness; it was founded with an ambition. On the same plane, the antiheroic narrator’s underground was formed with a forceful intention satisfying his yearning for “something different” (37) from the laws of nature.

However, just like the Westernized capital, the underground possesses a

deep-rooted ambiguity in its foundation. At the outset, both this abstract city and the underground serve to submit a specific ideology upon which the environment was built. Such a domineering prospect, nevertheless, rings determinist and discloses supremacy corresponding to the hegemony of the law of nature to which the

underground man defies the most. St Petersburg is but a symbol of a limited universe ruled by its fate. To escape from such fatalism, the underground man formulates his underground world that is not all better but “completely different” even if the difference has not found by him (37). In this corner, the underground man may be shying away from suffering in the intentional world of St Petersburg; however, he cannot escape from the torment of living reality in his premeditated underground, still suffering in his man-made prison.

The harsh climatic condition of St Petersburg reflects the severe environment of the underground in which the anti-hero struggles relentlessly. Both the city and the

underground are earthly hells bringing kinds of detriments to the underground man due to hostile living conditions. Winter in St Petersburg is associated with humidity, heavy snow, and long nights; and according to the narrative, St Petersburg is a city constantly covered with snow as the background of the story, disclosing a dim, bleak, and lifeless atmosphere. The harsh conditions are unfavorable and the severity to live in this city is indicated in the very first part of the underground man’s narration, accusing the Petersburg climate was “beginning to do [him] harm” (6). Yet in his underground prison, the anti-heroic narrator confesses he is “a sick man” whose “liver hurts” (3) dwelling in a limited space including all the harsh elements, far astray from decency, comfort, and coziness in terms of living.

The underground is “wretched, bad, on the edge” (6) of the expensive St Petersburg.

Although the living conditions of the city and the underground are extremely

unsatisfactory, the anguished soul refuses to leave to terminate his suffering. Rather, he regards himself as one of the unfortunates of all mankind suffering in this mundane world and thus he decided to “get into the muck on purpose, from misery” (93). In fact, the prison is not a hostile, tormenting, and unavoidable outer world of the intentional St Petersburg but a troubled, egoistic, perplexing inner world as his domain of suffering in the underground that serves as the root of his permanent struggle.

As mentioned above, both the city and the cellar can be interpreted as a symbolic space limiting the individual with a strong sense of confinement in the narrative.

Fundamentally, an excessive concern for self is viewed as a cause inducing this sense

of incarceration in both. In the underground, it is the underground man’s egoism detaining him in his corner where he finds perverse pleasure; out in St Petersburg, the extravagant emphasis on self-interest influenced by materialism and utilitarianism restrains the dweller. In Part Two, the underground man observes this prosiness (109) on a random Petersburg street filled with dullness and “with all sorts of passers-by”

(108) whose faces were “preoccupied to the point of anger.” Rationality dominates modern life. It is both the factor eliminating individuality and the constraint trapping those people in the street.

According to the underground man, his contemporaries, the characterless beings defined by him are confined in a predetermined city; yet as a self-designated

outstanding individual of “heightened consciousness” (8), this anti-hero retreats to his underground living life of inertia as “a limited being” (5) of intact individuality. In all honesty, neither way is an ideal approach to attain genuine freedom in that one still struggles in an environment manipulated by limiting forces without hope for spiritual liberation. Here, Dostoevsky seemed to deliberately present this insoluble dilemma as the real tragedy for a conscious mind in his time.

Psychological Aspect of the Underground: Moan

As symbol, the “moans” are inauthentic expression reflecting the underground confession formed with a purpose to exhibit the acute consciousness of the sufferer.

Pain is a sensory experience, an authentic feeling that brings about physical responses like crying and mental disorders like stress or depression; moan is a responsive act made to express this sensual feeling of pain or pleasure. As the underground man describes, moans are “not straightforward” but “crafty” (14) in that they are

formulated to fulfill specific purposes. This crafty trait taken up by the underground man, however, ironically corresponds to the inauthenticity revealed in his notes, mainly Part One, as highly reckless and inconsistent “crafty moans” from the underground. For example, he first states that he is at the age of forty and expresses his disdain to live beyond forty years old, calling it “indecent, banal, [and] immoral!”

(5) Yet in the same paragraph, he claims he is going to continue living up even to eighty years old. Here, his “troubled inner-world of consciousness” (Jackson 1981: 29) manifests itself with a conflicting statement formed by too much ego that denies the integrity of this character.

By criticizing the educated man’s “crafty moans” (14) as the result of pain, at the same time, this anti-hero marks the doubtfulness of his notes which are nothing but a showcase of his “too much” consciousness in underground suffering. The purpose of moaning is to satisfy one’s vain desire to display his acute awareness and cognition of a sensual feeling; from the underground man’s perspective, such moans are

deliberately styled for demonstration. His seemingly insightful analysis of the “crafty moans” (14) paradoxically highlights and ridicules his “pleasure in suffering” (14) conveyed by his designed, demonstrative, and contradictory notes.

Moaning is a way to express the recognition of sensuality experienced in an intense feeling. In the process of expressing it, the intense feeling exacerbates and transforms itself into a pleasant sensation of high degree. Based on the underground man’s notes, the sensuality in his confinement consists in the awareness of his reaching the bottom of the underground. This sensual process is depicted in Part One as a process in which

“the bitterness finally turned into some shameful, accursed sweetness” and finally “a decided, serious pleasure” (8) is derived to be the final outcome of his degradation.

By experiencing the ultimate pleasure in presenting his futile torment, he somehow finds a hypocritical positivity in suffering which brings him sensual enjoyment. His motive corresponds to the sick man’s intent of moaning to attain pleasure by

expressing the futility of pain (14) and the sufferer gains gratification in such “crafty”

expression.

In terms of the narrative, both moan and the underground symbolize the extreme form of demonstration of aimlessness in a pain and the underlying message is the futility of suffering for one’s own sake. Without an altruistic mindset, pain in suffering is meaningless but only fulfills one’s proud ego expressed by the crafty moans. The underground man is fully aware that both moaning and his underground bear a strong sense of mockery suggesting that an egoistic suffering is but a vain rebellion of no avail; however, it is this heartfelt irony that further propels the intensification of pleasure and reaches “the highest sensuality” (15) enjoyed by the underground man.

Abandoning his moral values, the underground man builds an underground prison ruled by his deformed consciousness and destructive ego perpetually tyrannizing his soul.

To analyze further, the irony of moaning also lies in its ineffectiveness in

transforming emotions into expression of no avail to ease physical pain. The moans denoted by the underground man are merely a series of emotional outbursts formed by craftiness and lack of genuineness. Although carrying himself with inauthenticity in words and in behavior, the underground man is always true to his emotions expressed by his notes; yet he presents his gnawing emotional convulsions through the form of confession, a purposeful technique used to disclose oneself with calculation. True emotions are expressed by a calculated method. The paradox of the authentic

emotions and inauthentic form of expression undoubtedly fulfills the writer’s purpose to unveil the contradictory, illogical, and various dimension of the underground.

In such a paradoxical, intricate, and perplexing presentation of the relation between man’s emotion and action, what is stressed is the expressive value of emotional writing. The narrative itself is presented as an ironic loop resonating with the narrator’s endless mental struggle in the underground; however, by writing his confessional notes, he is highly responsive to the torture suffered and thus transforms his struggle of mind into a work of value. As a sickened soul who refuses to be remedied, he moans with his notes from underground of which “the craftiness is the whole point” (14) due to its designing, expressive, and artful potentials just as the moans themselves.

The Social Aspect of the Underground: The Fly

In social terms, both the underground and the fly threaten the “well-being” of human society, defined by the underground man as “the refinements of ‘everything beautiful and lofty’” (7). Identified with its primitive structure, the fly is often recognized as “foul, obscene” pest; but from the perspective of the narrator who trumpets against the sophistication, advancement, and perfection yearned by the majority of his contemporaries, being a fly is a “more intelligent…developed…[and]

noble” (52) way to live. By confining himself to the underground, he achieves the goal to cast himself away from the major trend of thought⁸ vastly flourishing and

8 From a historical perspective, Western European philosophy, based on logic and rationality, had been greatly dominating Russian intellectual circle since the 1840s. One of the works adopting such

Romantic ideological trend is What Is to Be Done? (1863) written by an important radical writer Chernyshevsky, to whom Dostoevsky aimed his target of irony in Notes from Underground.

highly influential in Russian society. The “foul, obscene” (52) being of a fly, from the underground man’s viewpoint, is an alternative form of existence and as virtuous as his life as a “scoundrel” (8) in the underground.

Retreating from this intellectual trend by confining himself in the underground, the underground man is able to live freely with keen awareness while exerting his

self-will without any exterior impediment. The purpose of his underground

self-confinement is to discard any influence brought about by “the beautiful and lofty”

(7) and to savor an obscene and disgraceful style of living while preserving the highest degree of autonomy. He confesses in Part Two that he dreams to be transformed into a “foul, obscene…[but] noble” fly “ceaselessly giving way to everyone, humiliated by everyone, [and] insulted by everyone” (52) but enjoying the ultimate freedom in movement by flying. This “unbearable humiliation from the thought” granted him “immediate sensation” since as a fly, he would have not been confronted as a human; he could easily steer clear of and thereby gain the upper hand over his enemy, be it the officer who bumped him by shoulder in the street (49) or the

“stone wall” (13) created by the laws of nature, reason, and logic.

The fly and the underground, as symbols, fulfill the underground man’s wish for cutting off social relations. His estranged lifestyle away from human society in the underground is associated with one of the themes often brought up by Russian writers—a life “divorced from life⁹” (Jackson 1981: 25). In respect of the underground, the anti-hero’s self-inflicted exclusion is from a will to cut off

9 According to Jackson and Dostoevsky himself, since Pushkin, a theme of man estranging from his root is a distinct feature of Russian literature. In Part One of Notes from Underground, the theme of individual “divorcing from life” is revisited by the underground man who condemns the educated man of 19^th century for they “renounced the soil and popular roots,” turning away from the people, the soil, and the national element.

connection with those divorced from his Russian roots. With “heightened consciousness” (Dostoevsky 1864: 8), the underground man is aware of the

detrimental force of the “beautiful and lofty” (7) philosophy derived from rationality.

He is highly conscious of the consequence of an “intellectually developed” society enlightened by the logical and rational doctrine while shoving away the rustic, passionate, and “irrational” side of Russian culture. As the notes disclosed, he is “too

在文檔中杜斯妥也夫斯基短篇小說中的象徵主義 (頁 46-83)