Such is precisely the essence of all consciousness and thought. Well, and how am I, for example, to set myself at ease? Where are the primary causes on which I can rest, where are my bases? Where am I going to get them? I exercise thinking, and, consequently, for me every primary cause immediately drags with it yet another, still more primary one, and so on ad infinitum. As an individual, he reserves the right to ignore the idea that twice two makes four. In contrast, the direct man can accept the idea that we are descended from apes, but the man of acute consciousness rebels against such conclusions. Using his fiction as a weapon of ideological discourse, Dostoevsky challenges the ideologies of his time, mainly nihilism and rational egoism. As a young man, the Underground Man is already misanthropic, proud, self-effacing, and bitter, but he also still clings to certain ideals. The Underground Man, however, refuses to accept as binding the various conclusions of science. For in order to begin to act, one must first be completely at ease, so that no more doubts remain. The narration by the Underground Man is laden with ideological allusions and complex conversations regarding the political climate of the period. Dostoevskys Notes from Underground depicts a man who is deeply rooted in a lifestyle of misanthropy and bitterness. He irritates his former schoolmates, fantasizes about slapping Zverkov in the face, and drives Liza to tears by describing her horrible situation as a prostitute. How to explain it? Here’s how: as a consequence of their narrow-mindedness, they take the most immediate and secondary causes for the primary ones, and thus become convinced more quickly and easily than others that they have found an indisputable basis for their doings, and so they feel at ease and that, after all, is the main thing. The underground man is a spiteful man (he himself says so), who takes pleasure in annoying and harming others. I repeat, I emphatically repeat: ingenuous people and active figures are all active simply because they are dull and narrow minded.

“For the direct, lawful, immediate fruit of consciousness is inertia – that is, a conscious sitting with folded arms.

The underground man dostoevsky