ld age since no one should ever live past forty. But he himself will live past forty even though it is indecent. He lives in a poor room in St. Petersburg, which is bad both for his finances and for his health, but he will not move. The chapter concludes with the Underground Man's affirmation that he plans to talk about himself because this is the subject that gives a decent man pleasure.
             The footnote that opens this chapter serves to focus the entire work and also to give us a way of approaching it. Dostoevsky stresses the point that although the Underground Man is not a real person but a literary invention, people like him must exist given the nature of society and culture at the time. The purpose of the novel, then, is twofold. First, it must trace the emergence of a character such as the Underground Man within contemporary society and show the inevitability of such individuals existing given the cultural conditions. Second, since the Underground Man is clearly a disaffected and unpleasant character, the novel serves both implicitly and explicitly to criticize a culture that inevitably produces such individuals. Responding to the contemporary escapist trend of writing novels dealing with the past, Dostoevsky ironically points out that his protagonist is a character "of the recent past," thus forcing the reader to encounter in the novel not the remoteness of !
             past centuries, but the reality of the mid-nineteenth century.
             The text is full of contradictions from the very beginning. We are told at the outset that the Underground Man is sick, spiteful, unpleasant, superstitious, and educated. He presents us also with very concrete ways of seeing him. We know that his liver is diseased, that he is forty years old, and that he worked as a civil servant. These are all descriptions that attempt to help us understand exactly who the Underground Man is. Yet before we have had time to settle into an understanding of his personality, the...