http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notes_from_Underground

Notes from Underground (1864) is a short novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky. It is
considered by many to be the world's first existentialist novel. It presents
itself as an excerpt from the rambling memoirs of a bitter, isolated,
unnamed narrator (generally referred to by critics as the Underground Man)
who is a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg.

Plot summary
The novel is divided into two rough parts.

Part 1
Part 1 falls into an introduction, three main sections and a conclusion. (i)
The short introduction propounds a number of riddles whose meanings will be
further developed. (1) Chapters two, three and four deal with suffering and
the enjoyment of suffering; (2) chapters five and and six with intellectual
and moral vacillation and with conscious "inertia"-inaction; (3) chapters
seven through nine with theories of reason and advantage; (c) the last two
chapters are a summary and a transition into Part 2.

War is described as people's rebellion against the assumption that
everything needs to happen for a purpose, because humans do things without
purpose, and this is what determines human history.

Secondly, the narrator's desire for pain and paranoia is exemplified by his
liver pain and toothache. This parallels Raskolnikov's behavior in
Dostoevsky's later novel,Crime and Punishment. He says that, due to the
cruelty of society, human beings only moan about pain in order to spread
their suffering to others. He builds up his own paranoia to the point he is
incapable of looking his co-workers in the eye.

The main issue for the Underground Man, is that he has reached a point of
inactivity. Unlike most people, who typically act out of revenge because
they believe justice is the end, he is conscious of this problem. Though he
feels the desire for revenge, he does not find it virtuous; this incongruity
leads to spite and spite towards the act itself with its concomitant
circumstances. He feels that others like him exist, yet he continuously
concentrates on his spitefulness instead of on action that avoids the
problems he is so concerned with. He even admits at one point that he'd
rather be inactive out of laziness.

The first part also gives a harsh criticism of determinism and intellectual
attempts at dictating human action, which the Underground Man mentions in
terms of a simple math problem two times two makes four (see also
necessitarianism). He states that despite humanity's attempt to create the
"Crystal Palace," a reference to a famous symbol of utopianism in Nikolai
Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done?, one cannot avoid the simple fact that
anyone at any time can decide to act against what is considered good, and
some will do so simply to validate their existence and/or to protest that
they exist as individuals. This type of rebellion is critical to later works
of Dostoevsky as this type of rebellion is used by adolescents to validate
their own existence, uniqueness and independence (see Dostoevsky's The
Adolescent) in the face of the disorder one inherits under the understanding
of tradition and society.

In other works Dostoevsky constructs a negative argument to validate free
will against determinism in the character Kirillov's suicide in his novel
the Demons (that sumbebekos is supernatural). Notes from Underground being
the marked starting point of Dostoevsky moving from his psychological and
sociological themed novels to novels based on existential and or human
experience in crisis.

Part 2
The second part is the actual story proper and consists of three main
segments that lead to a furthering of the Underground Man's
super-consciousness.

The first is his obsession with a policeman who moves him out of the way
like a piece of furniture while breaking up a brawl at a bar. He sees the
officer on the street and thinks of ways to take revenge, eventually
deciding to bump into him, which he does, finding to his surprise that the
officer does not seem to even notice it happened.

The second segment is a dinner party with some old school friends to wish
Zverkov, one of their number, goodbye as he leaves for the service. The
underground man hated them when he was younger, but after a random visit to
Simonov's he decides to meet them at the appointed location. They fail to
tell him that the time has been changed to six instead of five, so he
arrives early. He gets into an argument with the three after a short time,
declaring all of his hatred of society and using them as the symbol of it.
At the end they go off without him to a secret brothel, and in his rage
later that evening the underground man goes there to confront Zverkov once
and for all, regardless if he is beaten or not. He arrives to find Zverkov
and company has left but it is there that he meets Liza, a young prostitute.

After sitting in silence for a while, the underground man confronts Liza,
who is unwavering at first, but eventually realizes the plight of her
position and how she will slowly become useless and go lower and lower until
she is no longer wanted by anyone. The thought of dying such a terribly
disgraceful death brings her to realize her position, and she then finds
herself enthralled by the underground man's seemingly poignant grasp of
society's ills. He gives her his address and leaves. After this, he is
overcome by the fear of her actually arriving at his dilapidated apartment,
and in the middle of an argument with his servant, she arrives. He then
curses her and takes back everything he said to her, saying he was in fact
laughing at her and reiterates the truth of her miserable position. Near the
end of his painful rage he wells up in tears after saying that he was only
seeking to have power over her and a desire to humiliate her. He begins to
criticize himself and states that he is in fact horrified by his own poverty
and embarrassed by his situation. Liza realizes how pitiful he is and they
embrace. The underground man cries out "They - they won't let me - I - I can't
be good!" After this he still acts terribly towards her and before she
leaves he stuffs something into her hand, which she throws onto the table.
It was a five ruble note. He tries to catch her as she goes out onto the
street but cannot find her and never hears from her again. He recalls this
moment as making him unhappy whenever he thinks of it, yet again proving the
fact from the first section that his spite for society and his inability to
act like it makes him unable to act better than it.

Literary significance and criticism
The Underground Man became a common character type in many of the works that
followed the novella. He is present in Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina in the
milder form of the character Nikolai Levin, in Anton Chekhov's Ward No. 6,
Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and in Joseph Heller's Catch-22 as Yossarian
the 28-year-old Army Air Corps Captain.

Like many of Dostoevsky's novels, Notes from Underground was unpopular with
Soviet literary critics due to its explicit rejection of socialist
utopianism and its portrait of humans as irrational, uncontrollable, and
uncooperative. His claim that human needs can never be satisfied even
through technological progress, also goes against Marxist beliefs. Many
existentialist critics, notably Jean-Paul Sartre, considered the novel to be
a forerunner of existentialist thought and an inspiration to their own
philosophies.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was very impressed with Dostoevsky,
claiming that "Dostoevsky is one of the few psychologists from whom I have
learned something," and that Notes from Underground "cried truth from the
blood". A thorough investigation of the source of this statement may be
found in a blog, Posts from Underground, in a post titled The Voice of
Blood. Since Wikipedia doesn't allow the linking of blogs, it can be found
through Google.

The novel has also been cited by Paul Schrader as an influence when he wrote
the screenplay for the film Taxi Driver, which has existential themes.

Oleg Liptsin has adapted Notes from Underground for the stage. The world
premiere was at the Phoenix Theatre in San Francisco on September 28th,
2007.

The novel American Psycho quotes a passage from 'Notes from Underground'.