Underground Man

by Edward F. Abood

Book by Abood, Edward F.

181 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1973

Reviews

[Tom Schulte · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author sees a similar basis during the era from Darwin's assault on the Creator to Communism's rise in novelists' exploration of an "Underground Man" at sea in these tumultuous changes of worldview and

Thus isolated, uncommitted, having rejected traditional or current values without having substituted new ones for them, burdened with a consciousness that spares nothing, not even himself, underground man is a malcontent living in a continual state of anxiety and doubt. It goes without saying that the nameless narrator in Notes from Underground is the perfect embodiment of the type. He reappears, in modified form, in innumerable contemporary novels. But he is most conspicuous-despite his often radical permutations-in Kafka's The Castle (1926), Hesse's Steppenwolf (1927), Sartre's Nausea (1937), Camus' The Fall (1956), Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers (1943), Malraux's Man's Fate (1934), and Koestler's Darkness at Noon (1941).

While I mostly read nonfiction, I have read three or four of these having been moved to do so by their apparent import. I feel that all are worth reading and considering with the depth plumbed here. I find the connections here intriguing in the surfacing in these novels of thoughtful humans groping in the darkness above a shifting floor, often discarding organized religion. Always interesting to me, early on many found refuge in Communism which, among other things, offered an anti-fascist philosophy. Then, with the 1938 pact between Stalin and Hitler, that too was pulled out from under them causing a boomerang in the loyalty of those like Arthur Koestler who

... begins with commitment to Communism and ends up discarding it for religious faith. After a decade of active membership in the Communist Party, Koestler is totally disillusioned with it. He is convinced today that Communism not only leads to social and political disaster but that, in addition, it frustrates man's spiritual craving (what Koestler calls the "oceanic sense"). Koestler, like Rubashov, rekindles in himself this longing for the infinite-a reality beyond the materialistic promise of Communism, beyond reason, beyond the known world itself. Marxism is purely secular and rationalistic: its absolute is "historical necessity"; therefore, it cannot fulfill this ontological need in man. Thus, with Koestler's criticism of Communism today, we come full circle to Dostoevsky's denunciation of rational liberalism in 1864.

The eight novels discussed in this book, then, provide a broad survey of underground man. Yet in our concern for him as a general type, we should not lose sight of his rich diversity or the unique genius of each of his variety of forms...

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