Notes From Underground is the written monologues of some extremely troubled unnamed narrator. It starts with an iconic opening line about how hes turned out to be a horrible person by his own admission. Which sets the theme that hes already a complete failure, this directs the reader's focus towards analyzing why hes so messed up rather than towards anticipating plot events. Dostoevsky delivers completely brilliantly on that focus, giving the reader some of the most ridiculously insightful and disturbing scenes to chew on that this book has gone down in history as one of the first sources on existentialism. To us his behaviors are are realistic on one level, absurd on another, relatable in some way but completely unimaginable in another. They are completely senseless and inconsistent to a normal person yet are consistent and rational from the narrator's extremely "unique" perspective. The reader's task is largely to psychoanalyze the narrator through his ramblings and scenes of his behavior. The book also critiques egoism and nihilism through this insane protagonist. Often the narrator will rationalize the terrible things he does and the reader is forced to figure out why he's wrong, which is consistently a deep philosophical and psychological exercise. The extreme depth of the underground man can be sensed in almost every scene thanks to dostoevsky's genius character writing.
Throughout the entire book every scene is insightful, engaging, and interesting in the deepest ways. This pacing is better than some of dostoevsky's longer works which have the same appeal but will arguably spread themselves just a little too thin with unnecessary length. This book is definitely an absolute must read, its short, dense, and powerful in its philosophical and social commentary, as well as very historically important and influential. I highly recommend it.
SPOILERS BELOW
He becomes so toxic in his nihilistic egoism that he tries to convince some random girl that its useless to try to move up in her job because shes putting too much trust in society's willingness to reward her work, indicating some traits of his own character, such as his tendency to use mental gymnastics to avoid fault for his own failings.
It seems that the underground man is caught in an endless dissonance between his extreme egoism and the world around him which behaves irrationally in his view. Instead of adapting to the world he teaches himself to hate it. He rejects every idea of morals and begins actively tormenting everything around him and rationalizes this insanity as some sort of justified punishment that hes serving the world, but the dissonance remains despite this, proving that the problem is within him, not society. He sees everyone else's happiness and decides to introduce some chaos into it. Chaos is his mode of being, he rejects the stability that others seem to represent.
At the end of the book he takes out his frustrations on the one girl that showed him any empathy, he tries to insult her on the deepest level he can and she tries to make him feel better but leaves after he converts that positivity into further anger and resentment, that choice being his ultimate and final rejection of morals, meaning and really anything good in the world. She leaves and takes with her the very last of his ability and opportunity to productively self reflect and make choices to improve his situation, to his immediate realization. From there he has doomed himself to a lifetime of pure dissonance, regret, and guilt. This scene is also built up extremely well by the prior scene of him anxiously waiting for her to arrive at his apartment, his monologues during that perfectly suit what happens when she arrives. Its an extremely tragic and moving scene, and a perfect ending to the book.