Dostoevsky's Quotes From Underground
“almost Thou persuadest me”:
REDEMPTION AND NEW TESTAMENT ROLE REVERSALS
IN DOSTOEVSKY’S NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND
Dostoevsky makes it clear early on in his Notes from Underground that his main character, the Underground Man, is quite the scoundrel. He is paradoxical and pathologically indecisive. Though deeply insecure, he is arrogant – believing himself to be more intelligent and certainly more perceptive than everyone else. He is a thorough-going misanthrope who despises everyone, including himself. He is both bully and bullied. Though poor and weak, he is obsessed with dominating others with whatever semblance of power he can muster – if not for any other reason, to give the appearance of control. He greets both pride and kindness with …show more content…
resentment – the beautiful and sublime with contempt.
The other main character, Liza, though not as reprehensible as the Underground Man, is also fallen. Dostoevsky implies that she may have been sold into prostitution by her own parents, and the reader is compelled to great sympathy at her plight. But, even so, she continues to sell her virtue to male degenerates in a filthy brothel under cover of night. A wicked “paradoxilist”XX and a tragic prostitute – though these descriptions may represent the most obvious account of each character, it seems that both Liza and the Underground Man have been given additional roles to play in this story that may be less evident, but not less important. It is the contention of this paper that Dostoevsky is writing Notes from Underground with biblical and even messianic parallels in mind for his main characters even though, on the surface, they may seem to be the most unlikley candidates for such a comparison.
The Underground Man as Christ
The differences between the Underground Man and Christ are obviously many, but the limited number of parallels that Dostoyevsky draws here are compelling and enrich the way the reader interprets his relationship with Liza. unlike Christ, the Undergraound Man’s motivations are always suspect because he is an admitted …show more content…
liar.
At first, she is the object of the Underground Man’s latest power trip, casting himself as the hero who will rescue/redeem Liza. When Liza is genuinely moved by the Underground Man’s speech, however, we realize that she may be even more innocent than expected.
The Underground Man, visits the brothel where she works and sleeps with her. In their ensuing conversation, he learns that she is a 20 year-old runaway from Riga who must earn her living as a prostitute in St. Petersburg (2:6). She is already in debt to the madam, so cannot freely leave the brothel
The Underground Man wakes up after having slept with the young prostitute.
Launches into a long, moralizing speech about the shamefulness of prostitution as a profession.
Liza implies that her own family may have sold her into prostitution
Describes beautiful breastfeeding scene to Liza
This lecture clearly moves Liza.
The Redeemed Prostitute – motif popular in progressive novels, poems, and plays of the mid-nineteenth century: altruistic hero rescues a young prostitute from a lifetime of degradation, using rhetoric to awaken the noble instincts that have been buried in her soul. In short, the hero appeals to the prostitute’s sense of the “beautiful and lofty.” doing so indicates that he has some power over her, this reveals that there is still beauty and tenderness left in Liza.
When the underground man goes on his relentless tirade against Liza and her lifestyle as a prostitute, we get a few glimpses that he might actually be trying to help her, that he might actually be merciful. But then he spoils the whole thing by saying it was the sport of it that he enjoyed.
Though not his original intentions, the Underground Man descends into the muck and mire to save Liza.
saintly prostitute unwilling prostitute
Of course, the UM is hardly an appropriate person to rescue anyone, as his own life is as miserable and empty as the lowliest prostitute’s.
Like Christ, the Underground Man “reforms” Liza: “the effect of his sympathetic and compassionate concerns to leave Liza in convulsive despair before the condition she finds herself in and with a desperate desire to leave her present way of life” (Wasiolek, 51).
Liza as Saul/Redeemed Prostitute (woman at the well, wash Jesus’s feet with her tears)
The Underground Man as King Agrippa II
After Liza does not come that evening, he spends a few days both dreading and anticipating her arrival. Certain that she will find him, the Underground Man curses her “pure heart”
In characteristic fashion, the Underground Man alternates between looking forward to Liza’s visit and dreading the fact that she will see the shabbiness of his apartment.
For the Underground Man, love means dominating someone until they have totally submitted
Liza nearly excuses herself, feeling as if she is intruding.
UM lashes out, saying he manipulated her with “pathetic words” so that he could humiliate her as Zverkov and the others had humiliated him earlier that night at dinner. At the beginning of the tirade, Liza is crushed, but by the end she understands that the Underground Man is unhappy, and she is filled with an agonizing sympathy for him.
She throws her arms around him and begins to cry. The Underground Man responds by throwing himself face down on the sofa and sobbing for fifteen minutes.
the Underground Man begins to feel ashamed again, realizing that the roles have been reversed: in the brothel it was Liza who lay face down and sobbed while the Underground Man preached to her, but now Liza is the heroine and the Underground Man is the “humiliated creature.” When he gets up from the sofa, he wants to dominate Liza again. She misreads his hatred and desire for revenge as genuine passion, and embraces him.
LIZA as Mary Magdalen or even Christ figure http://community.middlebury.edu/~beyer/courses/previous/ru351/studentpapers/Magdalen.shtml Liza becomes the repository for all the aggression he has built up against those he perceives as having slighted him throughout life.
Liza is a heroine worthy of a Romantic novel—gentle, simple, and kind.
Unfortunately, because the Underground Man has never been the object of this kind of interest and sympathy, he has no idea how to handle it. When Liza first puts her arms around the Underground Man, he is so confused that he bursts into tears and allows her to comfort him. It must come as an immense relief for him to receive love and tenderness after a lifetime of indifference and abuse.
Liza as Paul/Christ
She visits him in his home, and after another tirade, she forgives him yet again and sleeps with him (2:9) out of love rather than profit. In a moment of cruelty, he pays her for her services, and she departs, never to be seen again (2:10).
“in the midst of a furious diatribe against himself and against the world, he notices that she is listening, not to his versatile insults, but to the pain that underlies them.
She understands and is prepared to love him” (Conradi, 37).
At first it seems Liza can reform him, but the Underground Man overpowers her.
By paying her for what she gave freely out of love and sympathy
Her response to the Underground Man, her forgiveness of his actions, “she sees in a flash of insight his unhappiness, and through the warmth of true love she momentarily breaks through the vicious circle of hurt and being hurt”
The one purely beautiful moment in the story culminates in the end when Liza accepts the underground man despite his abusive treatment of her.
In the second to the last chapter the underground man admits that he could not live without tyranny over someone, in reference to either Liza or Apollo. It is here when he begins to seal his fate because he won’t submit his obstinate free will to the one who has the power to save him.
Even though the UM tells us that his heart leapt within him. He tries to stuff down this beautiful moment. He resists the drawing of Liza and his
conscience.
When Liza responds tenderly and understandingly to the abusive speeches the Underground Man makes at his apartment, however, we see that she is closer to a real heroine than we may have expected.
She is perceptive enough to see through the Underground Man’s façade of cruelty and apathy, and she is good-hearted enough to try to give him comfort and love.
When she finally realizes that the Underground Man is incapable of returning her love with anything but mockery and humiliation, she leaves with quiet strength and dignity.
UM asks Liza to get him a glass of water, represents cleansing and redemption, also implying Matt 10:42 and Mark 9:41
Liza is despised and rejected Isaiah 53:3-4
the Underground Man attempts to transfer the responsibility for all of his unhappiness to Liza’s shoulders. But in his final gesture to Liza as he tramples her act of love and tries to pay her for it, it becomes clear that he cannot be saved.
Liza’s presence convicts UM of his sin:
When Liza enters the apartment, the Underground Man “die[s] of shame” and runs into his room in a panic. “ I was only insufferably oppressed by her being here. I wanted her to disappear. I wanted “peace,” to be left alone in my underground world. ”
In this moment he has come undone, a wretched man
Almost Thou Persuadest Me
The, now, regretful Underground Man who missed his opportunity for redemption becomes a tragic version of the woman who washed Jesus’ feet with her tears/woman at the well “Why? To fall down before her, to sob with remorse, to kiss her feet, to entreat her forgiveness! I longed for that, my whole breast was being rent to pieces, and never, never shall I recall that minute with indifference.”
Agrippa, rumored to be in an incestuous relationship with his sister, is reported to have died alone and childless.
Rather than concentrate on love as a mutual exchange of tenderness and sympathy, in which he and Liza might comfort each other, the Underground Man can only see that the roles in their relationship have been reversed. He has lost his power over Liza, and now she dominates him. Liza is the only person in the novel over whom the Underground Man has felt any true sense of power, and he is furious with her for taking that power away from him.
At the end of the chapter, the Underground Man resolves to exert his power over Liza physically, by possessing her sexually and treating her as a prostitute even as she believes they are engaging in an act of love.
Acts 26:28 “Thou almost persuaded me” King Herod Agrippa II to Paul, Liza = Saul-turned-Paul pleading her case before pagan king. Paul tells of his conversion on the road to Damascus, which, in this case, is perhaps ironically an event that happened in the brothel and brought on by the preaching of the UM himself. “It hurts you to kick against the goads.’” The same message that Liza once received from the UM is now returning back to him.
so that they can more successfully bring us to an enriched understanding of the novella as a whole. has masterfully woven in subtle to add depth to it can be argued that these secondary roles are equally as tragic and as unexpectedly heroic as the primary roles. Not only does each character play the part of their antithesis, but these is an interesting role reversal between Liza and the Underground Man. unexpected, opposite , antithesis. Though they serve as deeply-flawed figures of their biblical counterparts, both Liza and the Underground Man elicit imporant similarities
The Underground Man operates in two different roles; alternating between both
Liza realizes that the Underground Man’s desire for her does not come from love, but from a desire to humiliate and dominate her. She realizes that he hates her and envies her.
he is incapable of love because, for him, love consists only of the right to tyrannize someone else.
calls after Liza immediately after she leaves, but she does not respond. She will not be taken advantage of.
A minute later, he finds the money he gave her crumpled on the table. The UM can’t buy her love or put her into his debt.
Liza is perhaps the only hope for the Underground Man’s redemption, as she is perceptive and patient enough to see through his proud, hostile façade to understand his mental anguish. In short, she is kind enough to care about him.
SHE has a genuine sense of the “beautiful and lofty” herself, though it is couched in modesty, shyness, and simplicity
The slamming door, however, signals Liza’s irrevocable disappearance from his life, and its sound resounds throughout the building. The Underground Man has been shut underground for good, with no more chances of escape. He has be JUDGED.
A different kind of snow is falling in the final scene. No longer wet, “dingy and yellow”… “It was a still night and the snow was coming down in masses and falling almost perpendicularly, covering the pavement and the empty street as though with a pillow. There was no one in the street, no sound was to be heard. The street lamps gave a disconsolate and useless glimmer”… this time the snow is much purer and more peaceful – but silent. As if to underscore a missed opportunity at redemption, perhaps his last opportunity.
REDEMPTION AND NEW TESTAMENT ROLE REVERSALS
IN DOSTOEVSKY’S NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND
Dostoevsky makes it clear early on in his Notes from Underground that his main character, the Underground Man, is quite the scoundrel. He is paradoxical and pathologically indecisive. Though deeply insecure, he is arrogant – believing himself to be more intelligent and certainly more perceptive than everyone else. He is a thorough-going misanthrope who despises everyone, including himself. He is both bully and bullied. Though poor and weak, he is obsessed with dominating others with whatever semblance of power he can muster – if not for any other reason, to give the appearance of control. He greets both pride and kindness with …show more content…
resentment – the beautiful and sublime with contempt.
The other main character, Liza, though not as reprehensible as the Underground Man, is also fallen. Dostoevsky implies that she may have been sold into prostitution by her own parents, and the reader is compelled to great sympathy at her plight. But, even so, she continues to sell her virtue to male degenerates in a filthy brothel under cover of night. A wicked “paradoxilist”XX and a tragic prostitute – though these descriptions may represent the most obvious account of each character, it seems that both Liza and the Underground Man have been given additional roles to play in this story that may be less evident, but not less important. It is the contention of this paper that Dostoevsky is writing Notes from Underground with biblical and even messianic parallels in mind for his main characters even though, on the surface, they may seem to be the most unlikley candidates for such a comparison.
The Underground Man as Christ
The differences between the Underground Man and Christ are obviously many, but the limited number of parallels that Dostoyevsky draws here are compelling and enrich the way the reader interprets his relationship with Liza. unlike Christ, the Undergraound Man’s motivations are always suspect because he is an admitted …show more content…
liar.
At first, she is the object of the Underground Man’s latest power trip, casting himself as the hero who will rescue/redeem Liza. When Liza is genuinely moved by the Underground Man’s speech, however, we realize that she may be even more innocent than expected.
The Underground Man, visits the brothel where she works and sleeps with her. In their ensuing conversation, he learns that she is a 20 year-old runaway from Riga who must earn her living as a prostitute in St. Petersburg (2:6). She is already in debt to the madam, so cannot freely leave the brothel
The Underground Man wakes up after having slept with the young prostitute.
Launches into a long, moralizing speech about the shamefulness of prostitution as a profession.
Liza implies that her own family may have sold her into prostitution
Describes beautiful breastfeeding scene to Liza
This lecture clearly moves Liza.
The Redeemed Prostitute – motif popular in progressive novels, poems, and plays of the mid-nineteenth century: altruistic hero rescues a young prostitute from a lifetime of degradation, using rhetoric to awaken the noble instincts that have been buried in her soul. In short, the hero appeals to the prostitute’s sense of the “beautiful and lofty.” doing so indicates that he has some power over her, this reveals that there is still beauty and tenderness left in Liza.
When the underground man goes on his relentless tirade against Liza and her lifestyle as a prostitute, we get a few glimpses that he might actually be trying to help her, that he might actually be merciful. But then he spoils the whole thing by saying it was the sport of it that he enjoyed.
Though not his original intentions, the Underground Man descends into the muck and mire to save Liza.
saintly prostitute unwilling prostitute
Of course, the UM is hardly an appropriate person to rescue anyone, as his own life is as miserable and empty as the lowliest prostitute’s.
Like Christ, the Underground Man “reforms” Liza: “the effect of his sympathetic and compassionate concerns to leave Liza in convulsive despair before the condition she finds herself in and with a desperate desire to leave her present way of life” (Wasiolek, 51).
Liza as Saul/Redeemed Prostitute (woman at the well, wash Jesus’s feet with her tears)
The Underground Man as King Agrippa II
After Liza does not come that evening, he spends a few days both dreading and anticipating her arrival. Certain that she will find him, the Underground Man curses her “pure heart”
In characteristic fashion, the Underground Man alternates between looking forward to Liza’s visit and dreading the fact that she will see the shabbiness of his apartment.
For the Underground Man, love means dominating someone until they have totally submitted
Liza nearly excuses herself, feeling as if she is intruding.
UM lashes out, saying he manipulated her with “pathetic words” so that he could humiliate her as Zverkov and the others had humiliated him earlier that night at dinner. At the beginning of the tirade, Liza is crushed, but by the end she understands that the Underground Man is unhappy, and she is filled with an agonizing sympathy for him.
She throws her arms around him and begins to cry. The Underground Man responds by throwing himself face down on the sofa and sobbing for fifteen minutes.
the Underground Man begins to feel ashamed again, realizing that the roles have been reversed: in the brothel it was Liza who lay face down and sobbed while the Underground Man preached to her, but now Liza is the heroine and the Underground Man is the “humiliated creature.” When he gets up from the sofa, he wants to dominate Liza again. She misreads his hatred and desire for revenge as genuine passion, and embraces him.
LIZA as Mary Magdalen or even Christ figure http://community.middlebury.edu/~beyer/courses/previous/ru351/studentpapers/Magdalen.shtml Liza becomes the repository for all the aggression he has built up against those he perceives as having slighted him throughout life.
Liza is a heroine worthy of a Romantic novel—gentle, simple, and kind.
Unfortunately, because the Underground Man has never been the object of this kind of interest and sympathy, he has no idea how to handle it. When Liza first puts her arms around the Underground Man, he is so confused that he bursts into tears and allows her to comfort him. It must come as an immense relief for him to receive love and tenderness after a lifetime of indifference and abuse.
Liza as Paul/Christ
She visits him in his home, and after another tirade, she forgives him yet again and sleeps with him (2:9) out of love rather than profit. In a moment of cruelty, he pays her for her services, and she departs, never to be seen again (2:10).
“in the midst of a furious diatribe against himself and against the world, he notices that she is listening, not to his versatile insults, but to the pain that underlies them.
She understands and is prepared to love him” (Conradi, 37).
At first it seems Liza can reform him, but the Underground Man overpowers her.
By paying her for what she gave freely out of love and sympathy
Her response to the Underground Man, her forgiveness of his actions, “she sees in a flash of insight his unhappiness, and through the warmth of true love she momentarily breaks through the vicious circle of hurt and being hurt”
The one purely beautiful moment in the story culminates in the end when Liza accepts the underground man despite his abusive treatment of her.
In the second to the last chapter the underground man admits that he could not live without tyranny over someone, in reference to either Liza or Apollo. It is here when he begins to seal his fate because he won’t submit his obstinate free will to the one who has the power to save him.
Even though the UM tells us that his heart leapt within him. He tries to stuff down this beautiful moment. He resists the drawing of Liza and his
conscience.
When Liza responds tenderly and understandingly to the abusive speeches the Underground Man makes at his apartment, however, we see that she is closer to a real heroine than we may have expected.
She is perceptive enough to see through the Underground Man’s façade of cruelty and apathy, and she is good-hearted enough to try to give him comfort and love.
When she finally realizes that the Underground Man is incapable of returning her love with anything but mockery and humiliation, she leaves with quiet strength and dignity.
UM asks Liza to get him a glass of water, represents cleansing and redemption, also implying Matt 10:42 and Mark 9:41
Liza is despised and rejected Isaiah 53:3-4
the Underground Man attempts to transfer the responsibility for all of his unhappiness to Liza’s shoulders. But in his final gesture to Liza as he tramples her act of love and tries to pay her for it, it becomes clear that he cannot be saved.
Liza’s presence convicts UM of his sin:
When Liza enters the apartment, the Underground Man “die[s] of shame” and runs into his room in a panic. “ I was only insufferably oppressed by her being here. I wanted her to disappear. I wanted “peace,” to be left alone in my underground world. ”
In this moment he has come undone, a wretched man
Almost Thou Persuadest Me
The, now, regretful Underground Man who missed his opportunity for redemption becomes a tragic version of the woman who washed Jesus’ feet with her tears/woman at the well “Why? To fall down before her, to sob with remorse, to kiss her feet, to entreat her forgiveness! I longed for that, my whole breast was being rent to pieces, and never, never shall I recall that minute with indifference.”
Agrippa, rumored to be in an incestuous relationship with his sister, is reported to have died alone and childless.
Rather than concentrate on love as a mutual exchange of tenderness and sympathy, in which he and Liza might comfort each other, the Underground Man can only see that the roles in their relationship have been reversed. He has lost his power over Liza, and now she dominates him. Liza is the only person in the novel over whom the Underground Man has felt any true sense of power, and he is furious with her for taking that power away from him.
At the end of the chapter, the Underground Man resolves to exert his power over Liza physically, by possessing her sexually and treating her as a prostitute even as she believes they are engaging in an act of love.
Acts 26:28 “Thou almost persuaded me” King Herod Agrippa II to Paul, Liza = Saul-turned-Paul pleading her case before pagan king. Paul tells of his conversion on the road to Damascus, which, in this case, is perhaps ironically an event that happened in the brothel and brought on by the preaching of the UM himself. “It hurts you to kick against the goads.’” The same message that Liza once received from the UM is now returning back to him.
so that they can more successfully bring us to an enriched understanding of the novella as a whole. has masterfully woven in subtle to add depth to it can be argued that these secondary roles are equally as tragic and as unexpectedly heroic as the primary roles. Not only does each character play the part of their antithesis, but these is an interesting role reversal between Liza and the Underground Man. unexpected, opposite , antithesis. Though they serve as deeply-flawed figures of their biblical counterparts, both Liza and the Underground Man elicit imporant similarities
The Underground Man operates in two different roles; alternating between both
Liza realizes that the Underground Man’s desire for her does not come from love, but from a desire to humiliate and dominate her. She realizes that he hates her and envies her.
he is incapable of love because, for him, love consists only of the right to tyrannize someone else.
calls after Liza immediately after she leaves, but she does not respond. She will not be taken advantage of.
A minute later, he finds the money he gave her crumpled on the table. The UM can’t buy her love or put her into his debt.
Liza is perhaps the only hope for the Underground Man’s redemption, as she is perceptive and patient enough to see through his proud, hostile façade to understand his mental anguish. In short, she is kind enough to care about him.
SHE has a genuine sense of the “beautiful and lofty” herself, though it is couched in modesty, shyness, and simplicity
The slamming door, however, signals Liza’s irrevocable disappearance from his life, and its sound resounds throughout the building. The Underground Man has been shut underground for good, with no more chances of escape. He has be JUDGED.
A different kind of snow is falling in the final scene. No longer wet, “dingy and yellow”… “It was a still night and the snow was coming down in masses and falling almost perpendicularly, covering the pavement and the empty street as though with a pillow. There was no one in the street, no sound was to be heard. The street lamps gave a disconsolate and useless glimmer”… this time the snow is much purer and more peaceful – but silent. As if to underscore a missed opportunity at redemption, perhaps his last opportunity.