He presents himself as a sick man who wallows in self-pity. But he is also a petty tyrant who enjoys making others unhappy, for the simple reason that it allows him the masochistic pleasure of unlimited self-loathing.

             As he puts it: "In despair are the most intense enjoyments, especially when one is very acutely conscious of the hopelessness of one's position". .

             Such a taste for degradation and humiliation lead him to the sorry, pathetic, paranoid episodes of Part II of Notes from Underground. Dostoevsky's narrator obsesses about revenge against a macho man who picked him up in a bar so he could pass by, humiliates himself with friends when he wants to be accepted, and deeply insults a prostitute named Liza for whom he actually has loving feelings.

             These contradictions are characteristic of Dostoevsky's novels, and give them the uncomfortable edginess and psychological introspection that is found in other 19th century writers such as Balzac and Zola. In that sense he is a writer for whom the rather nebulous term "modern" is applied, which basically means he is more interested in presenting realities in all their harsh truths than in painting pretty fictional pictures of idealized life.

             The narrator envies the "normal", and even goes so far as to say that perhaps the latter's stupidity is "beautiful". And yet the first part of the novel is basically one viciously devastating attack after another on the foolish, positivistic optimism that science and rationality would soon perfect human nature and solve all of man's chronic problems - values he pins on the gentleman.

             Dostoevsky keeps mocking apparently irrefutable notions such as two times two equals four, or the idea that worship of "the sublime and the beautiful" will solve all of our personal and species-wide problems. He basically says that man loves his destructiveness as much as his creative capacity, and that to remove these apparently evil tendencies through rational social engineering is not just futile, but not even desirable.