How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph). We used Constance Garnett's translation.
Quote #4
I got to the point of feeling a sort of secret abnormal, despicable enjoyment in returning home to my corner on some disgusting Petersburg night, acutely conscious that that day I had committed a loathsome action again, that what was done could never be undone, and secretly, inwardly gnawing, gnawing at myself for it, tearing and consuming myself till at last the bitterness turned into a sort of shameful accursed sweetness, and at last – into positive real enjoyment! Yes, into enjoyment, into enjoyment! I insist upon that. I have spoken of this because I keep wanting to know for a fact whether other people feel such enjoyment? I will explain; the enjoyment was just from the too intense consciousness of one's own degradation; it was from feeling oneself that one had reached the last barrier, that it was horrible, but that it could not be otherwise; that there was no escape for you; that you never could become a different man; that even if time and faith were still left you to change into something different you would most likely not wish to change; or if you did wish to, even then you would do nothing; because perhaps in reality there was nothing for you to change into. (1.2.2)
The Underground Man's enjoyment of degradation is simply a result of his masochism (his desire to inflict pain on himself), but he tries to justify it in grand and literary terms.
Quote #5
And the worst of it was, and the root of it all, that it was all in accord with the normal fundamental laws of over-acute consciousness, and with the inertia that was the direct result of those laws, and that consequently one was not only unable to change but could do absolutely nothing. (1.2.3)
The Underground Man can't justify his actions, so he chooses not to act. But this argument supposes that it is possible to do nothing. In fact, by not choosing, the Underground Man is still making a choice.
Quote #6
And I am the more persuaded of that suspicion, if one can call it so, by the fact that if you take, for instance, the antithesis of the normal man, that is, the man of acute consciousness, who has come, of course, not out of the lap of nature but out of a retort (1.3.2)
How interesting that the Underground Man calls the conscious man the opposite of the normal man. Not only are they opposites in nature, he says, but the conscious man exists as a retort to the normal man. The Underground Man's narrative technique of argument and imagined counter-argument seems to rise largely out of this duality.