Part 2, Chapter 1 — twenty-four years old

Part 2 opens with an epigraph from Nekrasov — a poem of remorse and rescue — and then the narration drops sixteen years back. The Underground Man is twenty-four. His life is already, by his own description, gloomy, ill-regulated, and as solitary as a savage's. He has friends with no one. He avoids speaking to anyone. He buries himself, more and more, in his "hole" — a smaller, earlier version of the basement flat we have been listening to him in.

He writes about his coworkers at the office. He hates them, all of them, and despises them, and at the same time is afraid of them. Sometimes he thinks more highly of them than of himself; sometimes he thinks much less. The alternation is unstable. A cultivated and decent man, he writes, cannot be vain without setting a fearfully high standard for himself, and despising himself almost to the point of loathing in his most intense moments. He sketches the social texture of his office life only to make clear that there is none; he sits at his desk, he goes home, he does not speak to anyone unless absolutely required to.

Then, late in the chapter, the dreaming begins. Between bouts of office life he retreats for months at a time into elaborate fantasies — long, narrative dreams in which he is noble, generous, magnetic, the centre of a beautiful and tragic destiny. The dreaming, he says, became a way of life. It alternated with bouts of "dissipation" and was interrupted, every few months, by visits to his one acquaintance Anton Antonovitch. The chapter is the prologue to the rest of Part 2 — the materials of which the catastrophes about to happen are made.