Part 1, Chapter 4 — the pleasure of toothache

Ha, ha, ha! You'll be finding enjoyment in toothache next! the imagined interlocutor cries. Well, even in toothache there is enjoyment, the Underground Man replies. He had a toothache for a whole month and he knows. He is going to develop the example. The sufferer's moans during a toothache, he says, are not candid moans — they are malignant ones. The malignancy is the whole point. They express the entire pointlessness of the pain, the awareness that nature is responsible and that nature is indifferent, the wish to inflict the sound on the family in the next room until they are sick of him for moaning.

He spells out the structure. The sufferer knows he is making a spectacle of himself. He knows the pain is exactly as bad as it is and not a fraction more. He knows that the family knows it; he knows they are listening with disgust; he knows they wish he would stop. And precisely because he knows all this, and is too conscious to pretend not to know, his moans take on a kind of bitter triumph. He cannot stop himself; he does not want to stop himself; the moans are now the pain and the protest against the pain and the petty satisfaction of being unbearable to the people obliged to listen.

The chapter is small but does important work. It is the first concrete example, after the abstract sketches of the previous chapters, of how acute consciousness operates inside an ordinary experience. Pain, for the Underground Man, is not just pain; pain is pain plus the consciousness of pain plus the performance of pain plus the half-shameful pleasure of the performance. The same structure, scaled up, is what produces every later catastrophe in the book. The toothache is a miniature of the dinner with Zverkov, and of the encounter with Liza.