How Does Fyodor Dostoevsky Notes From Underground End?

Question

The Underground Man's final rant leaves everything unresolved, feels like pure existential despair. Still processing his bizarre contradictions and that chaotic ending.

Herbert · Answer

When it comes to classic literature, it’s best to check out a summary or analysis of ‘Notes from Underground’ because the ending is complex and the author takes his protagonist down a heavy, psychological path of self-imposed isolation from reason and connection. As for a great story about people grasping for power at the bottom of society, look to ‘After Prison, I Became an Underground King’. A very fun power fantasy with an original take on a hidden underground society, ‘After Prison, I Became an Underground King’ is set in a modern, gritty urban fantasy world. The protagonist is an ex-con who has built an underground empire in the city’s magical hidden underworld.

Quinn · Answer

'Notes from Underground', the short novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky, ends on a deeply ambiguous note. The Underground Man’s lengthy, agonizing monologue is followed by a quite arbitrary recollection from his childhood, detailing his misbehavior at a dinner party many years ago. The longer story about the strange, repellent younger man is abrupt and nonchalant at the end, as if he didn’t care to elaborate on this particularly choice episode from his past. As a novelist Dostoevsky has done a magnificent job of creating in the Underground Man a gorgeously nihilistic, perpetually-puzzling figure whose impenetrability creates a multitude of disturbing questions about life, in which we are forced to dwell long after the end of the book.

No resolution or redemption is offered Dostoevsky’s protagonist. The Underground Man remains a thoroughly conflicted and tortured character, and it is quite fitting to find him in such a condition at the end of his story. His isolation and the uselessness of his rationalism are underscored in the novel’s final pages and continue to affect the reader long after he has finished reading.

Leo · Answer

Dostoevsky ends 'Notes from Underground' awkwardly for his Underground Man, leaving both him and the reader in the dark. He rehearses a particularly trivial gesture of spite from long ago and then simply stops. It’s a striking decision that has enabled this novel to retain its power to disturb long after it has been closed.

Quincy · Answer

One of the most confusing conclusions to a novel I’ve ever read is the end of Dostoevsky’s ‘Notes from Underground’. The Underground Man ends his rambling story by describing a boyhood prank he played on a group of people at a party, ruining the social occasion. And then he just stops telling the story of his life. It’s as if he’s surrendered to his frustrated nature, and Dostoevsky has thus shown us that this is what the human condition is like: surreal, illogical, and confusing. It’s a circle of self-destroying neurosis and obscure philosophy that leaves the reader unsatisfied but also unforgettable.

Emilia · Answer

There’s something psychologically vertiginous about reading Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky and something similarly disorienting about its conclusion. The Underground Man brings his ample observations about himself to a close with an apparently unrelated account of another incident: he crashes a party, does his worst, and then is simply gone. There is no culmination to his meandering soliloquy, no resolution to his travails. Dostoevsky is no doubt pointing out the futility of this pitiful man’s life, but we’re left to our own devices to come to terms with that. What is most impressive about this unsatisfying work is that it is precisely the unsatisfying nature of it all that lingers after we put the book down.

Pricillya Tokonaung · Answer

It’s a clever ending in that it serves as meta-commentary as well. The narrator essentially says, “And so that’s where I am for now. But don’t think that this will all just stop. I could just keep going on like this forever.” And so the reader is left with the uncomfortable feeling of just how pointless the narrator’s diatribe has been. It’s also unpleasant to read. But that’s the point of Dostoevsky. He’s trying to convey a certain state of being to the reader. The Underground Man’s consciousness is a trap with no exit. The ending of the novel looks much like the rest of the novel. Man’s natural desire for meaning and for order is contrasted with the “underground” — that is, destructive and negative — force that denies both. In the end, there is no solution, no exit from the Underground Man’s consciousness. We are simply left with the feeling of his nihilism, and we are forced to wonder whether there is any way out of it.

Hannah Opoku Acheamfour Annor · Answer

Much of the confusion regarding this novel’s ending stems from readers’ mistaken expectation of a resolve of the plot as found in most novels. In reality, the ending of Notes from the Underground consists of the narrator’s Notes simply ceasing. However, his psychological state, and thus his fundamental worldview, never changes one iota. The main character remains as he was at the very beginning of the work—very bitter and isolative, also philosophically paralyzed. Only in the final pages of the novel does it become absolutely, crystal clear to the reader that this protagonist is unable to change or even connect with another human being. After having recounted his encounter with Liza in excruciating and vivid detail, the protagonist immediately returns to his underground lair, reinforcing his previously expressed notion of his “unique, unusual, extreme” experience of suffering. And the novel ends with a masterful and devastatingly bleak note of futility—that the narrator could keep writing these Notes forever, in the same, toxic, stuck fashion. In other words, there is no catharsis whatever for this profoundly and Hopelessly lost soul; his mind is his own permanent prison.

KIDMINGUR · Answer

This is a very strange and even disturbing end to the Underground Man’s long rant. As if coming to the end of his own nasty and excessive writings was somehow disgusting to him, the Underground Man now goes on to add a final, almost apologetic postscript to his notes. “The notes of this paradoxalist do not end here, however. He could not refrain from going on” is the odd and somewhat pathetic conclusion to the Underground Man’s argument. For the entire book the Underground Man has been performing for us in a sort of spiteful and self-hating manner. And in this final sentence he is performing again – this time however in a half-hearted and somewhat self-disdainful fashion. In effect he is reinforcing the sense of the cruel and circular trap that is his consciousness. It is less a narrative ending than the impression of a man exhausting himself in a loud and prolonged scream. And the echo left when at last he is silent comes not from empty space, but from his own empty mind.

vicky klingler · Answer

I always feel a bit icky after reading the final part of this book. The section of the book with Liza is very intense and very cringe-worthy, but also very destructive. In that section of the book, Liza’s compassion is destroyed by Fyodor’s cruelty. Then Fyodor just withdraws from that scene and we are back to Fyodor in the ‘present’ writing these notes. After describing more of his outbursts, Fyodor finally says that even he is bored with them. Thus there is no more point in continuing this book. The final quote of the book is, “I am writing this only for myself, and so, whatever I may write, it will all be the same.” This quote is the ultimate expression of Fyodor’s nihilism and his spite. And the book ends, not with a period, but with an emotional ellipsis… He’s still there, writing, thinking, suffering, but also luxuriating in his own suffering. There’s no change, no growth, no hope. This is one of the most pessimistic closing notes to a book that I’ve ever read.

Er_Rash · Answer

I have been reading a lot of depth recently. The Underground Man would hate it. All this has led me to want to re-read something completely opposite in type to that: a silly isekai where the main character eats a lot of potatoes, eventually becoming OP. Perfect.

tim33160 · Answer

Most of all the novel gives the impression of solitude. After a torrent of words and frantic self-revelation, the novel ends where it began: in the lonely room of its narrator. He wrote this for himself, no reader was needed. These notes are disgusting to him. There is no solution to the problems of the Underground Man; he is to remain as he is, the modern, sick alienated man, mired in his hypersensitivity and spite. The novel does not end here, but it could have. It is a prelude to the spiritual crises of the great novels by Dostoevsky that were to follow. In this novel the Underground is all there is.

How Does Fyodor Dostoevsky Notes From Underground End?

11 Answers

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