How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph). We used Constance Garnett's translation.
Quote #4
I repeat, I repeat with emphasis: all "direct" persons and men of action are active just because they are stupid and limited. How explain that? I will tell you: in consequence of their limitation they take immediate and secondary causes for primary ones, and in that way persuade themselves more quickly and easily than other people do that they have found an infallible foundation for their activity, and their minds are at ease and you know that is the chief thing. To begin to act, you know, you must first have your mind completely at ease and no trace of doubt left in it. Why, how am I, for example to set my mind at rest? Where are the primary causes on which I am to build? Where are my foundations? Where am I to get them from? I exercise myself in reflection, and consequently with me every primary cause at once draws after itself another still more primary, and so on to infinity. […] So you give it up with a wave of the hand because you have not found a fundamental cause. (1.5.1)
According to many existentialists, the Underground Man's reasoning is right: since there is no objective truth, and since the universe is without reason, you can never justify any of your actions. However, an existentialist would condemn his conclusion of inaction. Just because you can't justify your actions doesn't mean you shouldn't act anyway.
Quote #5
He loves the process of attaining, but does not quite like to have attained, and that, of course, is very absurd. In fact, man is a comical creature; there seems to be a kind of jest in it all. (1.9.2)
Again we're back to the notion of absurdity; there's something very dark about the lack of reason in the world, but also something comical.
Quote #6
Another circumstance, too, worried me in those days: that there was no one like me and I was unlike anyone else. "I am alone and they are everyone," I thought – and pondered. (2.1.3)
Jean-Paul Sartre would later introduce the idea of the subject-object problem. Every man sees himself as subject and others as objects. He can never really conceive of another man as being a subject himself. The Underground Man is getting at something similar here; he sees a clear division between himself and everyone else. Those are two distinct categories in his mind, and he makes no attempt to see another human being as, well, a real human being.