[3] The novella presents itself as an excerpt from the memoirs of a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator (generally referred to by critics as the Underground Man), who is a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg.

The first part of Notes from Underground has eleven sections: The narrator observes that utopian society removes suffering and pain, but man desires both things and needs them in order to be happy.

The first part also gives a harsh criticism of determinism, as well as of intellectual attempts at dictating human action and behavior by logic, which the Underground Man discusses in terms of the simple math problem: two times two makes four (cf.

He argues that despite humanity's attempt to create a utopia where everyone lives in harmony (symbolized by The Crystal Palace in Nikolai Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done?

[9] The title of Part 2 is an allusion to the critic Pavel Annenkov's observation that "damp showers and wet snow" were indispensable to writers of the natural school in Petersburg.

[10] Following the title there is an epigraph containing the opening lines from Nekrasov's poem "When from the darkness of delusion..." about a woman driven to prostitution by poverty.

Sections II to V focus on a going-away dinner party with some old school friends to bid farewell to one of these friends—Zverkov—who is being transferred out of the city.

The Underground Man confronts Liza with an image of her future, by which she is unmoved at first, but after challenging her individual utopian dreams (similar to his ridicule of the Crystal Palace in Part 1), she eventually realizes the plight of her position and how she will slowly become useless and will descend more and more, until she is no longer wanted by anyone.

The thought of dying such a terribly disgraceful death brings her to realize her position, and she then finds herself enthralled by the Underground Man's seemingly poignant grasp of the destructive nature of society.

Liza believes she can survive and rise up through the ranks of her brothel as a means of achieving her dreams of functioning successfully in society.

However, as the Underground Man points out in his rant, such dreams are based on a utopian trust of not only the societal systems in place, but also humanity's ability to avoid corruption and irrationality in general.

The points made in Part 1 about the Underground Man's pleasure in being rude and refusing to seek medical help are his examples of how idealised rationality is inherently flawed for not accounting for the darker and more irrational side of humanity.

In the 1860s, Russia was beginning to absorb the ideas and culture of Western Europe at an accelerated pace, nurturing an unstable local climate.

There was especially a growth in revolutionary activity accompanying a general restructuring of tsardom where liberal reforms, enacted by an unwieldy autocracy, only induced a greater sense of tension in both politics and civil society.

The point the Underground Man makes is that individuals will ultimately always rebel against a collectively imposed idea of paradise; a utopian image such as The Crystal Palace will always fail because of the underlying irrationality of humanity.

The syntax can at times seem "multi-layered"; the subject and the verb are often at the very beginning of the sentence before the object goes into the depths of the narrator's thoughts.

[citation needed] The challenge posed by the Underground Man towards the idea of an "enlightened" society laid the groundwork for later writing.