• Blog – Comment on the underground man’s actions. How is acting here in relationship to the claims he made in Part 1?

The underground man is not acting very in sync with what he claimed to be in the first section. I think this is partially because what he has come to be is a result of what we are seeing in his actions and not because he is failing to live up to what he says. In fact it would be impossible for him to live up to what he says in the actions that we are reading now because they occurred before he became who he is, the Underground Man. It is interesting to me though to see just how the Underground Man conducted himself. He thinks and he thinks, and he ponders through everything that he does, but he still ends up acting like a little girl. He cannot compose himself enough to think of the big picture and lets himself get focused on the minutia. This shows no more prevalently in his encounter with the sergeant. He cannot stop to think of himself outside of his actions, which shows him not identifying the person he becomes. The person he becomes thinks and thinks but is still able to see past actions. He has to, he does nothing. This forced thoughtfulness of nothing is not embodied in his actions but I do think that as his actions continue and the more and more he encounters until he is eventually forced underground will result in him becoming more and more the Underground Man we come to know in the first section.