While it may seem banal to reference the opening line of Dostoevsky’s hauntingly mesmerizing novella Notes From The Underground, in forming an argument, it rings sufficient.
With “I am a sick man…I am a wicked man”, Dostoevsky channels the tortured psyche of one of his most lucid and harrowing characters, Crime and Punishment’s Rodion Raskolnikov. Given the proximity in which Dostoevsky wrote the two books, there may have been overlap between the two main characters.
As it were, Notes From The Underground follows little in the way of your standard novel, providing precious little dialogue to remove the reader from the schizophrenic episodes of the unnamed narrator, reminiscent of Dostoevsky’s approach to Raskolnikov as his mental faculties begin to erode. What dialogue Dostoevsky does provide gives a glimpse into the multiple personalities competing for the frayed ends of sanity in the fractured neuroses of a man possessed.
The narrator’s eroding sanity is evident in his approach to those around him in the second part of the novel. A police officer disrespects him with relative kindness and the narrator proceeds to stalk the man and seek revenge, “Devil knows what I would have given then for a real, more regular, quarrel, more decent, more, so to speak, literary!”(49) A conversation with Liza devolves into personal attacks as the narrator grapples with his insane need for equal footing in any passing acquaintance, “That’s easy to say! You’re young now, good-looking, fresh – so you’re worth the price. But after a year of this life, you won’t be the same, you’ll fade.” (91)
Left without any spiritual center or largely without anything constituting meaning, S.L. Frank would describe the narrator as attempting to stay grounded within himself. “Nor can we ground ourselves upon ourselves, solely upon the thirst for life, or the inner force of life in us, for this is to hang in air. (122) The narrator lacks a concrete moral foundation and is left wandering aimlessly in his mind. While he may possess the inner force of life, his fractured sanity does not allow him to contain it, leading to rambling, neurotic thoughts and an inability to think rationally.
The unwarranted interest in his rambling thoughts extends to the Mariner in Samuel Coleridge’s poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. The wedding guest is immediately enthralled by the Mariner’s tale for unknown reasons, eschewing his responsibility to the wedding party, in order to appease a new acquaintance. The Mariner captures the Wedding-Guest’s attention with a “glittering eye” (13), a look of sincerity for a man who appears cursed. Much like Dostoevsky’s narrator and the ideal in Frank’s novel, the Mariner is searching for a spiritual center.
Maybe we’re all wicked, sick men.