Part 1, Chapter 1 — "I am a sick man"

Notes from Underground opens with one of the most-quoted first paragraphs in nineteenth-century fiction: "I am a sick man.... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I think there's something wrong with my liver." The narrator is unnamed and will remain so. He is forty years old, a retired collegiate assessor, living alone in Petersburg on a six-thousand-rouble inheritance from a distant relative. He has not been to a doctor about the liver, he tells the reader, out of spite — though he immediately concedes he cannot say whom the spite is meant to punish.

He has been like this, he says, for twenty years. He used to work in a government office. He was a spiteful clerk: he ground his teeth at petitioners, took particular pleasure in upsetting timid ones, waged an eighteen-month war against an officer who clanked his sword too loudly at his desk. He won the war. Then — without preamble, four paragraphs in — he tells the reader he was lying. He was not really a spiteful clerk; he could not become spiteful any more than he could become kind, or honest, or scoundrelly, or even an insect. He has been aware all his life of swarming contradictions inside him, demanding outlet, which he refused to let out.

The chapter ends with the narrator asking what a decent man most enjoys talking about, answering "himself," and committing on that basis to talk. The structural joke of the book has been set up. The voice will not be a stable position; it will be a sequence of claims, retractions, second-order retractions, and bursts of self-disgust about the whole performance. Dostoevsky has put a forty-year-old man in a basement and given him a reader to argue with. Everything else in Part 1 is the argument.