Part 2, Chapter 7 — the address in his pocket

The chapter is shorter and almost entirely interior. The Underground Man walks home through the wet snow with Liza's address in his coat pocket. By the time he reaches his rooms the alcohol has worn off; by the time he wakes in the late morning the speech of the night before has acquired an entirely different complexion. He had been, last night, the noble figure who saved a fallen woman by speaking to her with terrible truthfulness. In the daylight he is a clerk in a basement flat with an unpaid manservant and a borrowed six roubles he has already spent.

He realises, with growing horror, that he has invited Liza to come to him. He has given her his address. She has it written on a scrap of paper. The chapter goes through the calculation again and again. Will she come? Will she not? If she comes, what will she find? She will find Apollon, ill-tempered, contemptuous. She will find the wretched flat. She will find him in his dressing gown. She cannot come. He longs for her not to come. He wants her, secretly and shamefully, to come anyway, because the not-coming would itself be a defeat.

Three days pass. He oscillates. He runs through speeches he will give her if she arrives. He runs through speeches he will give himself if she does not. His mind is incapable of letting the question rest; the consciousness diagnosed at length in Part 1 is now operating on a single piece of paper folded in his pocket. He cannot work. He cannot dream. He cannot read. He waits, in the kind of suspension he has been describing as his ordinary state, but with a stake in the outcome that he cannot manage. The chapter ends with the question still open. The fourth day will answer it.