Chapter 12 Chronic Rage from Underground: Reflections on Its Structure and Treatment

In his Notes from Underground1 Dostoyevski (1864) presents us with an unparalleled portrayal of his protagonist's chronic rage. This rage resides mostly within, a private inner experience that nevertheless dominates all behavior from its internal hiding place. Only occasionally does the rage burst forth into open, violent, vindictive, and revengeful attacks on those whose real or imagined slights create immense suffering for the protagonist. This suffering (as silent to the external observer as the rage it provokes) is marked by a subjectively painful sense of humiliation and degradation; by pervasive hypochondriacal preoccupations; by a constant elaboration of the most detailed plans for revenge to right even the slightest, but greatly magnified, wrong; and, most significantly, by a whole series of behaviors that we would undoubtedly judge from the outside as self-defeating but that Dostoyevski illuminates from the inside as desperate attempts to regain lost self-regard. All these reactions are embedded in the context of a pervasive sense of superiority and self-importance, which exists side by side with a sense of utter worthlessness and unbearable shame.

Dostoyevski lets the fictitious author of Notes reveal his agonies in the first person, thereby lending these compulsively honest, often monotonously repetitious, yet courageous and cogent self-revelations