Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground is a portrait of a man in constant friction with his own will. The frustrated, febrile protagonist quickly reveals to his readers an inner world characterized by desire and failure. Each chapter of the underground man’s life begins with an acute desire for a particular event to transpire—an event which he believes will bring him fulfillment in the form of identity. Sometimes this event is marked by honorable happenings and sometimes by debauchery. Regardless, each chapter ends with his inevitable failure to cause the desired event to occur and, as a consequence, the underground man falls into a deeper sense of obscurity and insignificance. To avoid a life of isolation, the underground man believes he must commit his will to a traditional definition of either good or evil. However, Friedrich Nietzsche, the eloquent and misotheistic German philosopher, might present the underground man with a third option—adherence to a new definition of good and evil.
The second chapter of Notes provides clear examples of the protagonist’s moral indecision and documents his path to dereliction. He writes, “I did not associate with anyone, even avoided speaking, and shrank more and more into my corner” (42). The underground man’s focus turns wholly inward and his exterior world reflects his circumscription. The protagonist includes numerous examples of his interior conflict and, throughout this second chapter, embarks on several “little debauches” (48) in search of his identity. These “debauches” also serve to distract himself from his interior conflict, as he writes, “I wished to stifle with external sensations all that was ceaselessly boiling up inside me” (48). In one instance of debauchery, he comes upon a man being thrown out a window at a bar and, wishing to receive the same treatment, enters the bar. Shortly upon entering, he encounters an officer who wants to pass by. The officer simply takes hold of the underground man by the shoulders and moves him to the side. The underground man becomes infuriated by this turn of events and writes, “Devil knows what I’d have given then for a real, more regular quarrel, more decent, more, so to speak, literary!” (49) He longs simply to be treated as an equal, however, he declines to fight and leaves the bar “confused and agitated.” The underground man constantly vacillates between his desire for a good and evil identity and writes that he is “morally obliged to become primarily characterless being” (5). To find fulfillment, he believes, he must decide whether to embrace or cast away his humanity and finds himself incapable of either choice. If the underground man had lived just a century later, he might have found a capable mentor in Friedrich Nietzsche.
The underground man might have found the answer to his conundrum if he had encountered the writings of Nietzsche. In The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche proposes a new definition of good, and, consequently, of evil and happiness. He writes, “What is good?—all that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man” (1). This new definition overthrows the status quo and opens up a new path for the underground man. Once Nietzche put God and all His precepts to death in his Gay Science, he cleared the stage for his maxims. Nietzsche, after dismantling the old law, must establish new rules: a new world order. Goodness is no longer a list of “thou shalt not’s” but a single, superlative axiom: the will to power. The age of morality is over and the world is finally ready for the accession of the Übermensch. As Nietzsche writes in Thus Spake Zarathustra, “Dead are all the gods: now do we desire the overman to live” (Part I, Section XXII,3). All other moral constructs hinge on the new good. Evil remains the opposite of good: “What is bad?—all that proceeds from weakness.” Happiness remains a result of doing good, as Nietzsche writes, “What is happiness?—the feeling that power increases—that a resistance is overcome.” The definitions of both evil and happiness rest on the definition of good. In redefining good, Nietzsche disposes of the underground man’s interior moral dilemma and replaces it with a simple solution: the enlightened path to happiness through the will to power.
The underground man might be initially resistant to Nietzsche’s postulation of a new good because he believes in the “beautiful and lofty” (7), or, that which he sees as fully good and, therefore, unattainable to one who can only achieve partial goodness. After his encounter with the six-foot officer, he begins to fixate on this man and decides to write him a letter. He writes that the “letter was composed in such a way that if the officer had the slightest notion of ‘the beautiful and lofty’ he could not fail to come running to me and throw himself on my neck and offer me his friendship” (51). It is not the friendship precisely that the underground man wants, but the equality that he believes can be found in friendship. He sees the officer as his superior and simply wants to “be on equal footing with him.” (52) Herein lies the problem, the very reason why his aspirations to the “beautiful and lofty” can never come to fruition. Nietzsche explains that equality and everything that the underground man desires, cannot be obtained through friendship but through power. Therefore, a new ideal must be set and Nietzsche proclaims this subsequent good. In Nietzsche’s new world, the underground man can finally realize his dreams. The “beautiful and lofty” is lowered to simple, crude power, and all the underground man must do to attain it is cast aside any desire for kindness, sacrifice, or friendship.
The underground man writes, “I never even managed to become anything: neither wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect” (5). He believes that this anonymity is the cause of his depressing, frustrating state. He must either become fully human or a beast, but he remains at a standstill, irresolute to choose either. There is, however, a third choice the underground man may have never considered. The choice of Friedrich Nietzsche would result in the fulfillment of his desire for identity and provide a path out of the underground. However, at the heart of every human being lies a tension between the desire to do good and the desire to do evil. If the underground man destroys this tension to commit fully to evil as his supreme good, he does it at the cost of his humanity.
