Part 1, Ch. 1
I am a sick man
The novel opens with the voice that runs through Part 1 — a forty-year-old retired civil servant addressing the reader directly from a basement flat in Petersburg. He is sick, he says. He is spiteful. He is unattractive. He refuses to see a doctor about his liver, he claims, out of spite. He used to work for the government; he has retired on a small inheritance; he is forty; he has been like this for twenty years. He admits, as soon as he has finished saying he was a spiteful clerk, that he was lying about that too. The chapter is short. The voice is the chapter.
Part 1, Ch. 2
Consciousness as illness
He turns to diagnosis. The reason he cannot become anything — not spiteful, not kind, not even an insect — is that he is too conscious. Being too conscious, he says, is a real disease, full-blown; ordinary human awareness would have been enough for an ordinary human life. Past a certain pitch, he argues, every impulse arrives accompanied by its analysis and every feeling by its counter-feeling; and at the moments when he is most capable of registering the sublime and the beautiful he is also doing the things he is most ashamed of. The two are linked. The chapter is the philosophical seed of the rest of Part 1.
Part 1, Ch. 3
The direct man and the wall
He compares the two types. The "direct" man, the man of action, the man who knows how to take revenge — when wronged, this man simply charges his target like an enraged bull, and only a wall stops him. (Direct men, encountering a wall, are stumped by it; for them a wall is something close to a moral fact.) The Underground Man envies him to the last drop of his bile. He cannot be him. He is the man of acute consciousness for whom revenge becomes the wish for revenge plus the suspicion that the wish is petty, by which time the moment has passed.
Part 1, Ch. 4
The pleasure of toothache
An imagined interlocutor laughs: next he will be finding enjoyment in toothache. He answers seriously — yes, even in toothache there is enjoyment. The sufferer's moans, he says, are not candid moans; they are malignant ones. They carry the pointlessness of the pain, the bitter awareness that nature does not care, the wish to hurt the family in the next room with the sound. The whole point is the malignancy. The chapter is a small case study of his larger argument: the man of acute consciousness can extract a kind of pleasure even from suffering, by performing the suffering for an audience he simultaneously despises.
Part 1, Ch. 5
Pleasure in degradation
One long paragraph. He asks whether a man who finds enjoyment in his own degradation can have a spark of self-respect — and answers, with some heat, that he can. The Underground Man has, he says, repeatedly enjoyed degrading himself. As a child he could never bring himself to ask for forgiveness — not because he could not say the words, but because he could say them too convincingly, and the convincing performance would have been another degradation. He used to get into trouble in cases where he had not actually done anything wrong, just for the texture of feeling guilty.
Part 1, Ch. 6
If only I had been lazy
A short, half-comic chapter. The Underground Man wishes he could have done nothing simply out of laziness. If he had — if "sluggard" had become his defining quality — he could at least have said one positive thing about himself. "Sluggard" would be a calling; he would have a label, a definition, a place. He could have grown a comfortable belly and a treble chin and a ruby nose and walked the streets being pointed to as Here is an asset, here is something real and solid. He cannot manage even this. He is not even a sluggard.
Part 1, Ch. 7
Rational interest
He turns to the polemic. Who first proclaimed, he asks, that man does nasty things only because he doesn't know his own interests? That if his eyes were opened to his real, normal interests, he would at once stop doing nasty things and become good and noble? It is, in the Russia of 1864, the most fashionable belief in the country. The Underground Man takes it apart. Man, he insists, will sometimes choose to act against his interest precisely to demonstrate that he is the kind of being who can. He will choose suffering. He will smash the calculations because the calculations make him predictable.
Part 1, Ch. 8
The piano key
He pushes the argument further. The imagined interlocutor objects: science is on the verge of demonstrating that what we call free will is nothing but a side effect of physical laws. The Underground Man concedes the point and refuses its implications. If science ever fully reduces the will to a formula — if every desire and every caprice can be predicted from antecedent causes — then man, in his own retaliation, will go mad on purpose. He will smash up the world to demonstrate that he is not a piano key. The reduction will not produce the predicted human; it will produce the man who will pay any cost to escape the reduction.
Part 1, Ch. 9
The anthill
Gentlemen, I'm joking — and I mean it. He concedes the joking and presses the argument. The ant has built the anthill, perfected it, completed the project; that is why ants are still ants. Man, mercifully, prefers the process of building to the building finished. The chess player, he says, loves the playing of the game, not the end of it. Perhaps the only goal on earth toward which mankind is striving is the incessant process of striving — that is, life itself, and not the goal. Once the goal is reached, two times two is four, the calculation is complete, and the man inside the calculation is dead.
Part 1, Ch. 10
The Crystal Palace
He arrives at the image the polemic has been pointing toward. You believe in a Crystal Palace, he tells the reader — a building that can never be destroyed, at which one will not be able to put one's tongue out or make a long nose on the sly. That, he says, is precisely why he is afraid of it. If it were a hen-house he could creep into it to keep out of the rain without pretending it was a palace. The crystal palace insists on its own perfection. Insisting on perfection forecloses the ordinary human freedom to disrespect what one has been given.
Part 1, Ch. 11
Long live underground
Part 1 closes on a self-cancelling triumph. Better to do nothing, the Underground Man cries; better conscious inertia; long live underground! Then, in the same chapter, the second move: I am lying. I do not believe a single word of what I have just written. I do believe it, perhaps, but at the same time I feel and suspect I am lying like a cobbler. The chapter ends Part 1 by demonstrating, in its own structure, the disease it has spent ten chapters describing. Even the conclusion has to be unmade.
Part 2, Ch. 1
Twenty-four years old
Part 2 begins. The narrator is now sixteen years younger — twenty-four, working at the same kind of office, living the same kind of solitary life in a smaller version of the same flat. He hates his coworkers and is afraid of them. He alternates between despising them and thinking they are superior to him. He has begun the long habit of dreaming — long elaborate fantasies of glory and noble action — that he will retreat into for years between bouts of contact with reality. The chapter is the prologue to the dinner.
Part 2, Ch. 2
The officer on the Nevsky
He recounts a small humiliation that grew into a two-year campaign. One night in a billiard room a tall officer in uniform brushed him aside without registering that anyone had been there. The Underground Man went home shaking. He spent the next two years plotting retaliation — borrowing money for a respectable overcoat with a beaver collar, learning the officer's habits, finally engineering a head-on collision on the Nevsky in which he refused to step aside. The officer did not notice the collision either. The two years took place entirely inside his head.
Part 2, Ch. 3
Simonov's flat
Bored, the Underground Man drops in unannounced on Simonov, an acquaintance from school. He finds two more old classmates already there — Ferfichkin and Trudolyubov — planning a farewell dinner the next day for Zverkov, who is being posted to the Caucasus. Zverkov was, all through school, the boy the Underground Man hated most precisely because the boy never noticed he existed. The Underground Man hears the plan and, to his own surprise and to everyone else's irritation, asks to come. The others assent grudgingly. He has booked himself a humiliation.
Part 2, Ch. 4
The dinner
He arrives at the tavern an hour early because he has misread the time. The others appear at six, surprised to see him already there. They are friendly to Zverkov and indifferent to him. He drinks too much. He delivers a sneering speech that nobody answers. He challenges Ferfichkin to a duel. He paces around the table while the others ignore him and resume their conversation. Eventually they finish dinner and decide to go on to a brothel. He has no money. He borrows six roubles from Simonov and follows them out into the wet snow.
Part 2, Ch. 5
Into the wet snow
He runs out of the tavern after them. "So this is it, this is it at last — contact with real life!" he shouts at himself, half-mocking, half in earnest. The wet snow is falling. He is drunk; he is humiliated; he is going to do something — he is not sure what. He flags a sledge; the driver demands six roubles; he hands him the money he has just borrowed from Simonov. Now everything is lost. He rides through the snow toward a brothel he is not entirely sure how to find.
Part 2, Ch. 6
The speech in the brothel
He goes upstairs with Liza. He sleeps. He wakes in the dark to a clock wheezing somewhere; it strikes two. She is lying beside him, awake. He begins to talk. The speech he gives over the next hour — long, intricate, half borrowed from sentimental novels and half horribly sincere — is about the life she is in, the family she has lost, the future ahead of her if she stays. He describes, with cruel specificity, the way she will end. She listens. She believes him. As he leaves, she gives him her address on a scrap of paper.
Part 2, Ch. 7
The address in his pocket
He walks home in the wet snow with the address in his pocket. By morning the speech of the night before has stopped feeling sincere and started feeling like a trap. He has invited Liza into his actual rooms, his actual servant, his actual coat, his actual money problems. The chapter is short and almost entirely interior: the Underground Man, in his flat, replaying the speech and inventing reasons why she will not come and reasons to wish she would not. He spends three days unable to decide.
Part 2, Ch. 8
The war with Apollon
The war with Apollon over a few rubles in unpaid wages has been running for weeks; it reaches its peak the morning Liza arrives. The Underground Man, in his dressing gown, screams at his elderly servant in the parlour while Apollon, immobile and contemptuous, refuses to be hurried. He borrows fifteen roubles from Anton Antonovitch to repay Simonov; he reports — falsely, complacently — that the dinner went well. He returns to the flat. The shouting at Apollon resumes. The bell rings. Liza is on the stair.
Part 2, Ch. 9
The cruelty
She comes in. The contrast between the man she has come to see and the man she has caught at the door is total. He turns on her. The speech of the brothel, he tells her, was a lie. He had been amusing himself with her tears. He had wanted to humiliate her precisely because she had let herself be moved. He keeps at it for several pages. Liza, instead of running, sees through it. She understands he is humiliated and frightened. She crosses the room and embraces him. He cannot bear it. He sleeps with her — to corrupt the moment, to convert what she has done into something he can dominate.
Part 2, Ch. 10
The five-rouble note
As she walks to the door he runs after her, opens her hand, presses a crumpled five-rouble note into it, and runs back across the room. He admits, narrating it, that he did this from spite — to convert her gift of love into a transaction so that he could survive what she had done. She walks out. On the table when he turns back is the note: she has thrown it down on her way past. He flies into the street. The snow is falling heavily. He runs to the crossroads. He stops. He never sees her again.