This first part of Fyodor Dostoevsky book entitled « Notes from Underground », is the narrative of a lonely, sick and over-conscious man.

The entire text is under the form of a monologue to an invisible audience, to whom the « Underground Man » tells his view of life and describes himself, mostly as spiteful but way too intelligent for the society he lives in. Therefore, even though he is a writer from the realism period, he could be linked to the thinkers of the Enlightenment. His way of criticizing the human race, and calling it stupid and unable to use reasoning in their everyday life, can be easily identified with writers like Kant.

From the very first chapter we understand the narrator is very contradictive of himself, he will seem to have a very low esteem of himself (« I am a most unpleasant man », 1307), but then try to proove how much smarter he is than other people, which leads us to believe that he is very uncertain about what he says, or that he is afraid of being judged by the readers. Also, he is interacting back and forth with the invisible audience (us, the readers) : « Now I would like to tell you, gentlemen… » (1309) or « … you cry out with a laugh » (1313), which lets us assume that even though he keeps on repeating that he does not care what « we » think, he is still looking for approval from the readers, or at least he is looking to make a connection. In this way the Man from Underground might be writting this text to look for people to share his thoughts with and to feel less alone.

In addition to that, the fact that the writer is conscious about his audience might make his text baised, in the way that he can not be fully trusted about the events being re-told.