Thoughts on Notes From Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
In Dostoevsky's book Notes from Underground, the main character tells a story in two parts. The first part captures the unlikability of the main character, the constant taunting and the arrogance born of his intellect. The first section is the hardest part to read but it is the most important part. He attacks the idealism of the Enlightenment: the certainty of their works and the preposterous nature of thinking humans are like machines.
He starts with the idea of the perfectibility of man and states that only the stupid believe such things. Surely, he would rebel. This is where he gets into 2+2=5. Why? Why not, he asks. What would be more fun than to say that 2+2=5 and to enjoy the childlike rage of the so-called enlightened men who see their works being mocked?
Man, he notes, is ultimately irrational. Only the tamest and most timid can be fashioned into piano keys. To live a life in "perfection" is not a life at all and would only be the haven of the dullest and most compliant. This is ultimately his most sweeping charge.
What the Enlightenment figures wanted was not to free man and make man perfect, but to make man conform to their ideals, and to replicate themselves endlessly, to mold people for their lot in life like the keys of a piano. But surely, no man could ever let this be.
To illustrate this, the narrator goes back to musing about 2+2=5. There is a charm in such a proclamation, a rueful indulgence, to transgress these men's works and to declare that even their vaunted math is not perfect. Why not, he says, because in the end there is joy in irrationality.
To admit this, however, is not something these men could handle. Ultimately their work is futile because the very nature of being human cannot be contained to the logic of rationality, as even in utopia man would find himself loathing and detesting it.
Amused with himself at shitting on the idealism of these new Priests, the main character then tells us a story about himself. The character is a spiteful coward, a man who causes his own problems because he wishes he could stand up for himself and be more than what he is.
He fights with his "friends", ever lonely but unable to admit that he is his own problem. He even meets a woman, a prostitute named Liza. Both fall for one another, but he is incapable of allowing himself to love her, though he wants to, and instead abuses her verbally.
He takes out his frustrations on her, irrationally abusing her by comparing his better station to the fact that she is a woman, owned by a powerful madame, who will keep her indebted to sell her to men for the madame's profit. He does this because he loves Liza, but cannot come to grips with being able to love her because he is too scared to be vulnerable. He knows she sees who he really is, and this is why she loves him, but he is too scared to let her in. It haunts him, and in the end she leaves him. He sinks into his self-isolation, writing his notes and knowing that ultimately there is no one to blame for what he does but himself.