Against Happiness: Guilt and Memory in Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground

Introduction

Looking back, individuals tend to organize their life stories around what broke them rather than around what quietly held them together. This asymmetry, already noted in classical ethics, finds one of its most radical literary articulations in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864). The text presents a form of consciousness that does not merely overlook happiness but actively repudiates it, treating suffering as the sole morally serious mode of existence. Read alongside The Idiot, where well-being appears without demanding reflection or self-justification, Notes from Underground reveals how pain can become not simply an experience among others, but the organizing principle of memory, identity, and self-judgment.

Pain, Consciousness, and Moral Authority

From its opening pages, Notes from Underground (Записки из подполья) announces its hostility toward harmony and satisfaction. The unnamed narrator introduces himself bluntly as “a sick man” (Dostoyevsky, 1864/2009), yet his affliction is not reducible to physiology. It is cognitive and moral. Excessive self-awareness, far from yielding clarity, produces paralysis, resentment, and inner division. Action becomes impossible because every motive is subjected to corrosive scrutiny before it can take form.

Within this framework, suffering acquires a paradoxical value. It becomes a sign of freedom. Against the rationalist conviction that human beings naturally seek happiness, the Underground Man insists on the right to desire what harms him. Pain, precisely because it contradicts reason, calculation, and utility, serves as evidence of individuality. What resists explanation is elevated to proof of authenticity.

Memory as Tribunal

This privileging of suffering has decisive narrative consequences. What hurts is remembered; what humiliates is replayed. The narrator’s inner life organizes itself around injury, converting pain into a form of moral capital. “To be too conscious is an illness,” he observes (Dostoyevsky, 1864/2009), yet this very illness grants him a perverse authority: only the one who suffers intensely appears entitled to speak truthfully about existence. Well-being, by contrast, is dismissed as superficial, even deceptive. It is not merely absent from the narrative; it is rendered philosophically suspect.

The second part of the text, composed of fragmented recollections, demonstrates how this logic operates retrospectively. Encounters with former classmates, officers, and social acquaintances are reconstructed as scenes of humiliation. Indifference wounds more deeply than open hostility. Memory does not function as a neutral repository of events; it acts as a prosecutorial instance. Guilt emerges, but without any horizon of reconciliation. The narrator accuses himself relentlessly, yet this self-reproach leads neither to ethical growth nor to repair. It sustains the very identity it condemns.

Guilt and the Inner Judge

At this point, Notes from Underground resonates strongly with Freud’s later description of the superego as an inner authority that “torments the ego with the same harshness as the external authority once did” (Freud, 1930/2010). Guilt in Dostoyevsky’s text does not restore balance or clarify responsibility. It forms a closed circuit, endlessly reaffirming the self as culpable and therefore significant. Suffering offers a paradoxical consolation: it confirms that one’s life possesses weight and seriousness.

This psychic economy becomes especially visible in the encounter with Liza. She offers understanding without accusation and presence without judgment. For a brief interval, something resembling happiness becomes possible, not exuberant or triumphant, but quiet, relational, and untheatrical. Yet this possibility proves intolerable. Accepting it would require relinquishing the identity forged through suffering. The narrator therefore destroys the moment, converting intimacy into transaction. Happiness is not missed; it is deliberately undone.

Refusal and Contrast: Notes from Underground and The Idiot

The refusal at work in Notes from Underground  becomes clearer when it is read against The Idiot. Prince Myshkin embodies a radically different relation to well-being. His moments of harmony are lived without being scrutinized or converted into moral achievement; they do not crystallize into narrative capital. Pain, when it arrives, interrupts this condition but does not replace it as the foundation of identity. Myshkin does not require suffering to justify his existence. The Underground Man does.

Where happiness in The Idiot remains largely unthematized, in Notes from Underground it is ideologically rejected. Where pain in the former wounds, in the latter it structures. Where guilt in The Idiot signals ethical sensitivity, in Notes from Underground it becomes identity itself. What appears in one work as quiet equilibrium is experienced in the other as an existential threat.

This difference is reinforced at the level of narrative voice. In Notes from Underground, the narrator’s speech continually undermines itself, yet no alternative perspective definitively replaces it. Readers are compelled to judge the act of judging itself. The text thus diagnoses a pathology without prescribing a cure, exposing the cost of a life narrated exclusively through pain without advancing a compensatory ideal of happiness.

Conclusion

The significance of Notes from Underground lies precisely in this exposure. Dostoyevsky does not argue that happiness is illusory. He shows how consciousness can become incapable of recognizing it, or worse, committed to its destruction. The problem is not that moments of fulfillment fail to occur, but that they fail to count. Judgment overtakes life, and memory becomes a tribunal rather than a dwelling place.

In this sense, the Underground Man stands as an extreme but revealing figure: a subject for whom suffering is not the enemy of happiness, but its substitute. His tragedy does not lie in the pain he endures, but in his inability to imagine a form of fulfillment that would not dissolve the self he has constructed from pain.

References

Aristotle. (1999). Nicomachean ethics (T. Irwin, Trans.). Hackett Publishing.

Dostoyevsky, F. (2009). Notes from underground (R. Pevear & L. Volokhonsky, Trans.). Vintage Classics. (Original work published 1864)

Dostoyevsky, F. (2003). The idiot (R. Pevear & L. Volokhonsky, Trans.). Vintage Classics. (Original work published 1869)

Eco, U. (1989). The open work (A. Cancogni, Trans.). Harvard University Press.

Freud, S. (2010). Civilization and its discontents (J. Strachey, Trans.). W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1930)