Part 2, Chapter 9 — the cruelty

The Underground Man stands before her crushed, crestfallen, revoltingly confused, by his own description, doing his utmost to wrap himself in the skirts of his ragged dressing gown. Apollon disappears into the kitchen with the deliberate slowness of a man who has heard everything. The Underground Man and Liza are alone in the parlour. He gestures her to a chair. She sits. She gazes at him open-eyed, the narration says, evidently expecting something. The naïveté of expectation drives him to fury, but for a few minutes he restrains himself.

Then the cruelty. He turns on her. Everything he said in the brothel was a lie — he had been amusing himself with her tears; he had been performing moral superiority for himself, with her as the audience. He develops the cruelty in the same way he developed his speech of three nights before, only in the opposite direction. He attacks his own sentimentality of that night. He attacks her credulity. He says things calculated to wound. He says things he will, in the narration looking back, identify as the philosophy of Part 1 in operation: "with me loving meant tyrannising and showing my moral superiority."

Liza does not run. She does not even argue. After a long silence she crosses the small room and puts her arms around him. The narration registers the gesture as the one thing in his life that has happened to him without his arranging it. He cannot bear it. He converts it, with a frantic instinct, into something he can dominate: he sleeps with her. He is not loving her — he is corrupting the moment of her tenderness so that what she has done can be reduced to a transaction he understands. Whatever might have been saved has now been broken on purpose.