Notes from Underground

Summary

A bitter, unnamed retired clerk addresses the reader from his shabby Petersburg room, attacking rational utopian philosophy in a furious monologue before recounting the humiliations that shaped him. Dostoevsky lets his narrator argue that human beings will act against their own interest simply to prove they are free, a claim that undermines every tidy theory of progress. The short novel is widely treated as the first existentialist work of fiction and a key that unlocks Dostoevsky's later masterpieces.