The underground man does not reveal or share his reasons at least to himself. He is forcibly carrying himself to the unknown destination. Human imperfection is a law of nature and the cause of his pain is unknown to the outsiders. He is incomprehensible of his own deeds. Sometimes, he is the noblest of all living creatures at the same time he is capable of the basest actions. His anguish is covered stories of national calamities, illiteracy, unemployment, diseases, deaths, financial worries, and social status. He is incapable of attack, rebel or provoke. He is a snail. He is a gunny sack with loads of painful memory. He wants to be like that. He likes to continue with his stupid unreasonable pain. He does not deserve sympathy. He is not selfish. He owns nothing, he owes nothing. His silence is killing him. He even likes his dark, poor, and dirty room. He is intelligent but he never works for money rather social recognition; however it is is not true either.

REFLECTIONS:

Even today, the underground man is capable of comparing to the Dostoevsky’s underground man as both men appreciate worldly pleasure and material world. Material prosperity is engraved day to day with science and technology. Man is marveling at graceful lifestyles. Fast living with calculators, computers, and automobiles just instead of type machines, piano keys, and theory of evolution by Darwin. There is nothing change just increased the volume of work. There is no privacy as people are working together towards a common goal. The people are submitting to organize living with assiduous plan and action. This is advanced Crystal Palace of 1851 in London. The modern world is encouraging team work, people skills, working smart, transparent glass of repository for knowledge and brilliant work place at the same time underground man is delving into deeper ground. The underground man does not identify another underground man behaves with him as if he is modern “on ground man”. Some notes in his book underlined with tears and reads it constantly and accepts drowsy numbness pain like John Keats. His own statements in the notes are contradictory. He writes sharply without logic or reason.

The notes are a kind of confessions he pretends to accept or perhaps a set of memoirs. He does not want to explain his alienation because he likes to be alienated.

The underground man is contemptuous of not having material prosperity. He is accused of his own fate, which may force him to be alone. In the face of utilitarianism, man can produce things simply to prove his intelligence. He is not compliant against tooth ache or liver pain. He does not want to say it in the public. He is proud of his useless behaviour. He has false contempt of his own. The underground man forcibly joins unexpected public work place for money. His physical need is more significant that his emotions. He suffers from antagonistic position in troubled inability to understand the world. The man wants to relief his mental weariness with physical comfort symbolized in the underground man of masochism. He tries to seek pleasure artificially. The underground man repents after meeting Liza, feeling guilt and shame. However, his emotional priority surpassed by physical need once again over ruled the underground man having sex with Liza again in his apartment. He does not want to do but even does not know why he does so. If a man has done nothing simply from his intelligence, how the underground man should have respected himself, then, people should have respected themselves because he should at least have been capable of being lazy; there would at least have been one quality, as it were, positive in him, in which he will have believed his- self. Who is this underground man? A sluggard; how very ugly it would have been to hear that of oneself! It would mean that he is positively defined; it would mean that there was something to say about him. He is no one’s friend, and indeed there is no one foe to him. When he prepares for any undertaking this gentleman never explains to anybody, not even a chance of suspect. His absurd man negates everything that goes beyond the perception of his senses revealing highly materialistic attitude to life: Whatever he believes, what resists him that is what he understands. How he must behave in accordance with the laws of reason and truth. He never shows any excitement and passion of the true normal interests of man. It is not just record of his ‘Notes’ but stupid person for the world. I believe he might make a mistake in beginning to write them; anyway he has to feel ashamed all the time he started telling this story. So it’s hardly any literature but as a philosophical punishment. Why, to tell long historical examples, showing how he has spoiled his life through morally damaged, literally grown, and through lack of fitting environment, through suspended real life, staying in the underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a story needs a hero, and all the characteristic of hero is himself produces an unpleasant impression, for we are all refused to believe and accept him as hero. Every life is crippled with manacles of stupid work, every one of us; more or less feel burden of unworthy life which is useless someday. We are absolutely divorced from dream world. He is being crippled by too much introspection.

NATURE OF LIFE:

The underground man is a spiteful, he is being crippled by too much retrospection and he is not capable of judging his condition. Though actions are the very moments of conscious, he knows he is wicked, sick, and filthy man. He promises that he is going to be a good man but he does not want to change. It is his problem. He is not able to overcome because he does not know how to overcome. He pretends as if he is a good person. He thinks much about nothing, it is his disease. He argues no one will be entirely honest, to oneself. Though existentialism shows bitterness and resentment to make understandable, his reasoning however cannot be accepted. The absurd mind dismisses out of hand the existence of Almighty and hope of eternal life, and those who adhere to such beliefs according to Realism are fools who “feed on the roses of illusion”

There are some ugly moments in everybody’s lives and no one wants to share them with anyone. Man constantly talks about truth, goodness, honest, love, respect, and trust. In the present generation no one is worth possessing these qualities. People do not have quality in their live because life itself is absurd. One has to understand that life is mere a passing cloud. The moment he is conscious about his deeds he can not be a happy.

Karmanye vadhika raste, Ma phaleshu kadachana; ma karma phala he tur bhuh, ma te sangvasta karmani;

Its forty seventh verse in second chapter of Bhagawad Gita. This verse explains the importance of disinterested work in the life. As per this verse, individual should work towards his goals, but he must not desire the outcome for the work. “You have a right to perform your prescribed action, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your action. Never consider yourself the cause of the results of your activities.

Somehow they have to succumb to evil deeds. They have to surround their souls to the Devil of their wicked wishes as Dr. Faustus. Man wants everything perfect in scientific world illogical world; the underground man dare not see the world’s challenge perhaps hiding in the ground. The modern man has so many acquaintances that he lost his identity. He may pretend friendly but it his base nature to be malicious and have filthy thoughts. Humans are thirst for knowledge, it is an apparent mechanism and their hope increases. At the end, this wondrous universe can be reduced to the atom and the atom itself can be reduced to the size of electron. When uncertainly is found in the universe the same paradoxes we may find in human life.

THE UNDERGROUND MAN AND HIS SUFFERING:

The man in the underground is always alone. His emotions with external world are convoluted and even sometimes contradictory. He wants to give meaning to his life by his actions rather reading from ancient holy scripts. He argues that universe has no logic, and no reason; He is in locomotion in river of meaningless world. He does not want to disturb the flow. When Man becomes conscious of his existence he will not be happy ever. He also argues that every man is in isolation that is why he is trying to fight against his loneness and in regards to it he starts connecting with people. However, man is happy with loneliness and his suffering because he is conscious about himself. His soul is with him. It is known fact that time carries people to the future on its wings of days, months and years. He is consciously dead; he can not control the time and his fate. He is quite against to himself and has to adjust himself according to time.

Suffering is necessary. It is eternal futile conscious. It will bring him joy because his tears are with him. He is cataleptic by so many questions he posed, doubts he raised. These twenty years will not bring him any difference with regards to the meaning of life. The more suffering he gets, the more conscious he feels that delves further in to the underground. He argues that suffering is joyful especially when at rock bottom stage where there is no ray of help then torture is inevitable and withholding his thoughts will not lift him up rather has to suffer more. He can not escape from pain so let him enjoy his wicked life. Suicide is crime; universal law of human rights does not permit man to commit rather forces him to torture more with deadly life. Law itself is senseless, what about human being!

I would like to reinforce the idea of absurd space in human life. It has begun breeding in to lives by crimes, violence, and wickedness. This paper argues that his suffering is not based on his imagination rather apparently caused lives colonized by unconscious mirth. Man is subjugated with his own will. There is no moral or legal restrains, his acts deem indignation and pride. His only thought of irrationality of human existence with regard to the world triggers this desperate dilemma of life’s worthiness or worthlessness. Life is futile existence. It drives to despair and makes incompetent to accept challenges of world.

REALITY OF MAN AND HIS FATE:

It is his own will that prevents man away from his assigned purpose. He may not embrace his life as he has seen thorns of faded despair. He can not find the meaning of his life because the world is apart from each person and beyond us, and it is entirety beyond human potential understanding. Because it is only through the acceptance of the absurd and a cope with it, an underground man might get happiness unconsciously. He must not be aware of his life and purpose. Then an essential knowledge that allows for the true meaning and most pleasurable life experience, beyond that of one which never fully comprehends the nature of the relationship between oneself and the world, or the connection between what one may frivolously desire from the world and his own existence; life and the world’s complexity which accepts it further for better understanding the link between trilingual connection of life, death and the world.

This is really a pathetic situation of middle class life of a person. Man works and spends his laborious days from nine to five in the dark room of his company only to sustain his life and paradoxically he possesses all these things by his continuous struggle of toiling his life. He has to realize his commute to be devoid of extrinsic meaning, his daily labor, his mortgage, and anything else in his life and life questions the very worth of living. Time passes by and he will die, and then will everybody that he knows, and eventually there will be no evidence or his friends and family, or the society in which they live, was ever in existence. He may be overcome by the divorce between himself and his surroundings, his desire for meaning and the world’s complexity is not understood.

The underground man is writing a note after note, his laborious work never be redemptive. His understanding of his life is paradoxical on the other hand he is controlled by his emotions and on the other hand he has his own fancies. He is a shameless creature in the world. He tries to forget the world, forgive his people, forgo his ego, ignores his people’s faults, he has his own axe to grind among the people as he pretends to have love.

PARADOXICAL VIEWS:

As we move into part II, The underground man attacks on the view of Romantics. He argues Russian romantics are different from Europeans. Russians appreciate the sublime and beautiful with a tinge of reality. His notion of sublimity is killed by his basic human instinct which clearly shows when he sleeps with a prostitute named Liza. After having sex with her, he lectures Liza on how she really should not be a prostitute and purpose of noble life. She is the object of the Underground Man’s latest literary fantasy and power trip. He thinks himself as the literary archetype of the redeemed prostitute and has cast himself as the hero when he rescues Liza. We understand that Liza’s sentiment can come from innocence of the Underground Man’s Romanticism and that her response to the Underground Man’s speeches is not noteworthy. Liza wants to live in as artificial world but the Underground Man creates with his “sentimental” speeches, Nevertheless any gullible girl may fall in the trap of flattery. Later she has expected to be a romantic heroine instead of an ordinary prostitute. However, she is capable of seeing through the Underground Man’s façade of cruelty and apathy towards her. The realization has come from within by nobility of thought.

Logic never works always; it’s the method of application of logic that can prove one way of thought. Logic can never take into account things such as emotions; it’s strictly straw man logic to think dismisses such variables.

For instance:

1=1

X=Y

XY=Y²

XY-X²=Y²-X²

X(Y-X) = (Y+X) (Y-X)

X =Y+X

1=1+1

1 = 2

CONCLUSION:

It is one’s action that makes things happen rather one’s passion. Sometimes passion is stronger than one’s ability to do actions yet human beings are victim of their deeds. The Underground man suggests that man has the freedom to fight against everything, even 2+2=4 logically proven but he also admits that he is to blame for everything in his life. Because he is always alone, the underground man acts as a great last runner to the existentialist notion that every man is in constant isolation from his fellow human beings. "There are no more barriers to cross. All he has in common with the uncontrollable and in fate, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem in life has caused, and his utter indifference toward it, he has now surpassed. His pain is constant and sharp, and he does not hope for a better world for anyone.

REFERENCES:

Berthoff, Werner. (1965) The Ferment of Realism: American Literature, 1884-1919. New York: Free Press

Fanger, Donald (1998) Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism: A Study of Dostoevsky in Relation to Balzac, Dickens, and Gogol. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press

Lawall, Sarah. Ed. “Fyodor Dostoevsky.” The Norton Anthology of world Literature Vol. E. New York: Norton: 1301-1306.