Part 1, Chapter 5 — pleasure in degradation

Tell me — can a man who tries to find enjoyment in the very feeling of his own degradation possibly have a spark of self-respect? The chapter consists of a single long paragraph that answers in the affirmative and refuses to apologise for the answer. The Underground Man is not, he insists, speaking from any sentimental remorse. He has taken pleasure in degrading himself for as long as he can remember, and the pleasure is real, and so is the self-respect that produces it. The two go together more closely than the reader will be ready to accept.

He gives an example from childhood. He could never bring himself to say, "Forgive me, Papa, I won't do it again." Not because he was incapable of saying it — quite the opposite. He was, he says, perhaps too capable of saying it, and of saying it convincingly. He could perform contrition flawlessly. But precisely because he could, the performance felt to him like another, deeper degradation: he would be using the sincerity-machine he was unfortunately equipped with to manipulate his father, and he would know he was doing it. Better to refuse the apology. Better to be punished without contrition than to perform contrition cleanly.

He notes that, as a child, he often got into trouble in situations where he was not actually to blame. He generated guilt where none existed, because the texture of feeling guilty — and of being treated as guilty by people who did not realise he was performing it on himself — was a kind of pleasure he had access to. The relationship between consciousness, vanity, and degradation in the Underground Man is not a contradiction but a single mechanism. The man takes pleasure in his own ugliness because the pleasure is the only thing he is sure is his own.