Recommendations
Books Like Notes from Underground
Eight novels of alienated consciousness, existential crisis, and modern self-division
Dostoevsky's foundational existentialist novella recommends fiction that probes the most extreme corners of individual consciousness, examines the gap between self-knowledge and self-deception, and engages with the philosophical tradition the Underground Man inaugurated.
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Crime and Punishment
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Raskolnikov's theory that extraordinary men are above conventional morality — the first of Dostoevsky's major novels, written immediately after Notes from Underground; where the Underground Man remains in his hole arguing against reason, Raskolnikov acts on a comparable theory and then must live with the consequences; Crime and Punishment is the dramatic externalization of the Underground Man's internal monologue
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The Stranger
by Albert Camus
Meursault's flat account of his own crime — the French existentialist novel most directly in the Underground Man tradition; where Dostoevsky's narrator is hyperconscious, self-contradicting, and unable to act without anguish, Camus's Meursault is hypoconsciousness, affect-flat, and able to act without any self-reflection; the two characters are mirror images — the opposite responses to the same existentialist question of how the individual relates to a meaningless world
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The Brothers Karamazov
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky's final and most ambitious novel — three brothers, a murdered father, and the Grand Inquisitor; Ivan Karamazov is the Underground Man's spiritual successor: the brilliant intellectual who argues that without God everything is permitted but cannot live without the idea of God; the novel contains Dostoevsky's fullest response to the Underground Man's argument about freedom and determinism
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Nausea
by Jean-Paul Sartre
Antoine Roquentin, a historian in a provincial French town, experiences the nausea of confronting existence directly — the existentialist novel most directly in conversation with Notes from Underground; Sartre was deeply influenced by Dostoevsky, and Roquentin's journal (the form Sartre chose) directly echoes the Underground Man's mode of self-examination; where Dostoevsky's Underground Man is trapped by spite, Sartre's Roquentin is paralyzed by radical freedom
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The Idiot
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Prince Myshkin, a Christ-like figure with epilepsy, enters St. Petersburg society — Dostoevsky's attempt to answer the Underground Man with a 'positively good' man; where the Underground Man is the most unflattering possible portrait of hyperconscious modern alienation, Myshkin is Dostoevsky's attempt to imagine what genuinely good, unself-conscious virtue would look like; the juxtaposition reveals what Dostoevsky thought was missing from modern life
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Hunger
by Knut Hamsun
An unnamed writer in Christiania (Oslo) starves and hallucinates while refusing to compromise his artistic standards — Hamsun's 1890 novel is the Scandinavian equivalent of Notes from Underground: a radically interior first-person narration of a consciousness that has turned against itself; Hamsun's influence on Kafka, Beckett, and the entire tradition of alienated literary modernism is comparable to Dostoevsky's influence on existentialism
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Demons
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
A provincial town infiltrated by a revolutionary cell — Dostoevsky's novel of nihilism and political radicalism; Stavrogin, the central figure, is the Underground Man taken to his logical extreme — a man of absolute will and no moral compass who has destroyed everyone who loves him; Demons is the external, political companion to the internal, philosophical Notes from Underground
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The Catcher in the Rye
by J.D. Salinger
Holden Caulfield's monologue about phonies and his breakdown — the twentieth century's most widely read Underground Man, translated into American adolescence; Holden shares the Underground Man's fundamental characteristics: hyperconscious self-awareness, contempt for the society around him, inability to connect with other people, and a voice so compelling that readers identify with him even as he describes his own failures; Salinger never acknowledged the Dostoevsky debt but it is unmistakable
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