I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased… don’t consult a doctor for it and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, but am superstitious). No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite… My liver s bad, well – let it get worse!
In this first paragraph the underground man has already established himself as firmly in the grasp of his human-ness. With his respect for the learned and scientific doctor and his medicine in contrast (or not, “anyway”), with his superstitious way, he immediately establishes for us the frame he will work through for the rest of at least Section One, and eventually the entire novella – what we might call The Aristotelian Problem, which is man as the rational beast. Are we beast, or are we rational? In which do we find our essence? We can see in that term, “rational beast”, where my thoughts fall on this. The word “rational” serves as the modifier to “beast”. Of course, one could say “beast of rationality” and we would still face the problem, which is that both words are required in an exegesis of what it is to be human.
I chose “exegesis” over “hermeneutic” here to bring up its religious associations, as we can find in this paragraph the heart of religion, even before our introduction to The Aristotelian Problem. “I believe my liver is diseased”, says this sick man. But what is his affliction? It is an affliction to his liver. But what does the liver do? The liver is that part of the body that relieves it of its waste. It flushes the body clean of the things it has taken in that offer it detriment. So our narrator is filled with bile that he cannot flush away. And for that reason we find him full of spite. We might see this – particularly in light of his coming relationship with Liza – as his self-diagnosis of acute and potentially fatal salvation anxiety, perhaps stemming from a terminal case of existence. But so much in the way of salvation anxiety, he is as Melville’s Ahab, when he says, “Ahab beware of Ahab. There might be something in that.” And we will sit as Ishmael sits – as aware of the problem as our anti-hero, but unable to interrupt. Perhaps we are not terribly concerned with interrupting, as we worry over our own condition of existence, which this man’s story brings us all too familiar with. As Ishmael says, “If you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.”
Our man underground bares himself fully in this first paragraph as the a man sick and grappling with his ternal state as a rational beast, which certainly is enough to link him to his reader, but there is more in him that makes him a horrible mirror in which to gaze. He identifies himself as “well-educated enough not to be superstitious”. Ignoring the social and political significations, in order to ignore the turmoil of Dostoyevsky’s Russia, this word, “educated”, is still one to consider. Being educated is a matter of taking in, hearing and listening. “Being educated is…” is a passive structure. Taking in, hearing, and listening are passive ways of being, prima facie, as is reading. Anyone reading Notes, it could be said, has a desire to possess an education. In Notes, we receive one, which our narrator provides for us.
And the reader of Notes is subversive in her reading this text at all. The act of reading is a subversive thing – a way of communicating that we are each alike - that we are empathetic to each other. And in his sharing this story, regardless of his cries to the contrary, the narrator is subverting his own isolation.
The underground man, in only his first few sentences, demonstrates himself as a man in the throes of battle with himself, with his world, with his mortality, with his want of the other, he is conflicted in every sense of the word, and for that reason he can never serve as our traditional hero – a man of clear mind and quick action – The man of action. Instead, he is merely human. And it is for that reason that his reader gazes in on him only to see herself… and to shriek back in fear of what she sees.
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