Part 1, Chapter 6 — if only I had been lazy

Oh, if only I had done nothing simply out of laziness! the chapter begins, and the rest is the elaboration of the wish. The Underground Man would have respected himself, he says, if his idleness had been straightforward sloth. To be a sluggard would have been a calling. Question: What is he? Answer: A sluggard. He would have had a label, a definition, an identity that could be summarised in one word. He would have lived at ease and died with dignity.

He goes on, half-mocking himself. He could have grown, by middle age, a comfortable belly and a treble chin and a ruby nose, and walked through Petersburg being pointed to as Here is an asset, here is something real and solid. The other half of the joke is serious: the Underground Man's affliction is precisely that he is unable to be characterised by anyone, including himself, in any single word. He has spent forty years being all the contradictory things at once and none of the simple things even briefly. To be definable is to be a participant. To be the Underground Man is to be too varied for participation.

The chapter is short and almost playful in its register, and Dostoevsky uses the lightness deliberately. Behind the joke is the same diagnosis as the previous chapters. Acute consciousness does not produce a richer self; it produces an indeterminate one. The man becomes a swarm of contradictions which cannot resolve into any usable identity, and which therefore cannot be lived as any particular kind of life. He is not even a sluggard. He is the kind of man for whom even sluggardliness would require a self-coherence he does not have.