Part 1, Chapter 9 — the anthill

Gentlemen, the chapter opens, I am joking, and I know my jokes aren't brilliant. The Underground Man insists on the joking and refuses to give it up. He puts a question to the reader. You — the rationalist, the utopian, the engineer of human happiness — want to cure men of their old habits and reform the will in accordance with science and good sense. But how do you know that it is even desirable to reform man in this way? What makes you so confident that man's inclinations need reforming?

He answers by way of an image. The respectable race of ants, he says, began with the anthill and will probably end with it; the anthill is their accomplishment, complete and admirable, and it is also why they are still ants. Man is not built like that. Man is "a frivolous and incongruous creature," and perhaps, like a chess player, loves the process of the game itself rather than the end of it. Perhaps the only goal on earth toward which mankind is striving lies in this incessant process — that is to say, in life itself, and not in any particular goal that life is supposed to be in service of. Two times two equals four, the Underground Man writes, is "the beginning of death." It is the moment after which there is nothing left to do.

The chapter is short. Its point is to defend, with surprising tenderness, the value of incompleteness. Human beings do not want to be finished. They want to be in motion. The Crystal Palace — and any other achieved utopia — is the wrong gift to give them, because the gift presupposes that arrival is the goal. Arrival is the disaster. Man, given perfect happiness, will smash the lamp in the parlour just to have something to argue about.