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LIONEL TRILLIN6
plight by every device of bitterness and resentment, by hostility toward
those of mankind who are more unfortunate than he is, and also by
the fiercest contempt for his more fortunate fellow-beings, and for
the elements of good fortune. He hates all men of purposeful life,
and reasonable men, and action, and happiness, and what he refers
to as "the sublime and the beautiful," and pleasure. His mind
is
subtle, complex, and contradictory almost beyond credibility-we
never know where to have him and in our exhaustion we are likely
to explain his perversity in some simple way, such as that he hates
because he is envious, that he despises what he cannot have: all
quite natural. But we are not permitted to lay this flattering unction
to our souls-for one thing, he himself beats us to that explanation.
And although it is quite true,
it
is only a small part of the truth. It
is
also true that he does not have because he does not wish to have; he
has arranged his own misery-arranged it in the interests of
his
dignity, which is to say, of his freedom. For to want what
is
commonly
thought to be appropriate to men, to want whatever it is, high or low,
that is believed to yield pleasure, to be active about securing it, to
use common sense and prudence to the end of gaining it, this
is
to admit and consent to the
conditioned
nature of man. What a
distance we have come in the six decades since Wordsworth wrote his
Preface! To know and feel and live and move at the behest of the
principle of pleasure-this, for the Underground Man, so far from
constituting his native and naked dignity, constitutes his humiliation
in bondage.
It
makes him, he believes, a mechanic thing, the puppet
of whoever or whatever can offer him the means of pleasure.
If
pleasure is indeed the principle of his being, he is as
known
as the
sum of 2 and 2; he is a mere object of reason, of that rationality
of the Revolution which is established upon the primacy of the
principle of pleasure.
At one point in his narrative, the protagonist of
Notes From
Underground
speaks of himself as an "anti-hero." He is the epony–
mous ancestor of a now-numerous tribe. He stands as the antagonistic
opposite to all the qualities which are represented by that statue
of Sophocles which Professor Margarete Bieber tells us we are to
have in mind when we try to understand the Greek conception of the
hero, the grave beauty of the countenance and physique expressing
the strength and order of the soul; the Underground Man traces
his
