Notes from Underground

The work splits in two. It opens with a long unsigned monologue, the confession of a retired minor official who argues from his corner in Petersburg that a person can want something other than his own advantage. It then turns to a remembered episode, an evening with former schoolfellows and its aftermath with a young woman named Liza, where the narrator's talk meets other people and comes apart.

For a clinician the interest sits in the mechanism. The narrator reports his own contradictions as they happen and defends them, refusing a doctor out of pique, insulting the person who treats him best, choosing the outcome that costs him most. Toothache becomes a performance staged for an audience that is not there. Dostoevsky lets the reasoning run to its end without correcting it, so the reader watches spite operate as a settled position rather than a lapse, and watches a man protect the very thing that ruins him.