Part 1, Chapter 3 — the direct man and the wall

How do people who know how to take revenge actually do it? The chapter opens with the question and answers it by sketching a type: the "direct" man, the man of action, who when seized by the feeling of revenge has nothing else in him but that feeling. Such a man simply charges straight at his target like an enraged bull with his horns down. A wall will stop him; nothing else will. He may be stupid, but the stupidity is precisely what allows him to act. Revenge feels like justice to him because he has not stopped to ask whether it is. The Underground Man envies him "until I'm green in the face."

Then the contrast. The man of acute consciousness cannot do this. For him, revenge does not arrive as a single feeling. It arrives as the feeling, plus the awareness of the feeling, plus the suspicion that the feeling is petty, plus the further suspicion that the suspicion is itself a self-flattering performance, plus the residue of all of this churning while the moment of action passes. The wall, for the direct man, is a thing he charges. For the man of acute consciousness, the wall is a fact he respects too thoroughly to charge at all. He sees it; he understands its mass; he sits down in front of it and does nothing.

The Underground Man is careful to point out that his envy of the direct man does not collapse into a wish to become him. He envies him and despises him at once. The bull is beautiful precisely because he is stupid. To become the bull would require not knowing what one was; the Underground Man cannot unknow. The argument is structural. Two species in the world: those who can act because they don't know themselves, and those who cannot act because they do.