Indeed, What is to be Done?
The Conclusion of the Story of The Underground Man
But I am not done yet, no, I have more to say. The whispers of the forsaken call to me to speak for them, and I will answer. But I will do so in silence, in solitude and under the cover of my freedoms as a person. They will never know who I am or what I am or why I am. They will never know whether or where or why I build myself up just to fall again.
Rage, disgust, contempt, insanity, madness, the core of my life is all of these things; I am the Alpha and the Omega of all things true to life. I am no one; I am nobody, nothing, no more. My life is but a fortress in which there resides the truth, no one will take it from me, I say no one. Take what you will, I have nothing to give.
I sit in my underground cell and appreciate the beauty of it as a castle, an edifice where I can spread my wings and look at the clipped feathers. You are all weak, if I could, I would find you and bring you to great suffering, but I don't know who you are, or who the reader of this will be, or if it will be read, am I talking to myself? I think that maybe I am talking to myself, which makes me think that maybe just maybe my morale may be dropping. I don't know anymore.
But I am incapable of feeling, of knowledge, of being within this world. I would let my mind wander, but I am afraid it would not return. I believe that this reminds me of the time I kidnapped myself.
"Dear Diary, I kidnapped myself today, I sent a ransom note and everything. I left the note over there, or maybe over there, and I went and hid under the bridge, and proceeded to ponder over whether or not anyone would actually care enough to come pay me to relinquish myself. Maybe they will love me more, but I don't care, they can all rot in the bowels of hell."
Hell, I am hell. I am a wretched man with morals with truth with happiness. Sodom and Gomorrah are my paradise and the Garden of Eden is my Siberian wilderness. No one ever came for me to find me, no one ever paid my ransom, and I merely pondered under the bridge night and day for approximately a fortnight. I don't ever want to feel, like I did then. I am a man and I am an animal ready to reap what I have sown but at the same time I refuse to be part of this society.
People just don't think anymore. I tested a man the other week. I walked up to him and I spat right in his face. I walked up to him I looked him right in the eyes, procured as much mucus as I could find in my throat, and I spat right on his left cheek. He had the nerve to look at me with contempt, to pull out two Kopeks and put them in my hand. How dare he give me charity? I couldn't help but wonder when the other shoe was going to fall and when he was going to bludgeon me, but at least that could make me feel alive.
Sheep, "Baaah". People are dirty sheep, dirty little weak sheep, I can't stand it. Living by the thoughts of the greater consciousness, letting their own inhibitions become the inhibition. It is no longer the institution of government; it is the inhibition of human kind. The human form. Religion is the source of all evil.
This one thing is true, religion made me, religion made me evil, it made me wretched, it made me hate the world. I am hated. I am despised. No more will I try to be part of this society which has driven me this far into chaos and exile. I am an exile living in the middle of the heart of society. I will kill that part of the world. What is to be done? Kill them all, kill the politricks, kill the ones who will not be part of the killing and kill those who kill. I am so faint, so numb, that I feel the world crawling in my skin, I feel the paper cut society encroaching on me, I need to break this habit of necessity for societal acceptance, I am done lying from you. I can't feel this way anymore, I can't be driven any further underground because I am hitting a core of solid rock, I feel it bashing against my head and grinding my bones into a pulp. Eat me, consume me o lord of mine, I am done regretting the actions that I have taken. I am sick of these priests who rob and rape while whispering holy mumblings and spraying their blood tainted incense all over my world.
Oh I am not done yet, and I won't be for quite a while. I couldn't stay quiet for long, it was a couple of months since the last time I wrote, and I needed to tell all you beautiful people in your beautiful world about my beautiful thoughts.
I can be condemned as insane, angry, radical, enraged, but never wrong. You cannot tell me that I am wrong, because you are wrong. You are all insane to disagree with me. I see you there with your smug expressions and your undershirts, and your monocles, peering down your noses at me. I see you, you are worms, no wait you are the creatures that feed upon the excrement of worms. Humans are a viral infection on the world, no penicillin will get rid of this disease, but maybe a forty-five caliber pistol will put a reasonable dent where one is needed. Death to you who are too blind to agree with me, death to you who are too sheepish to disagree with me, death to you who are neutral, because apathy is the worst crime in the world.
You are ungrateful creatures of habit. I will kill you all. I killed a man last month. I went to the local pantry to get a loaf of bread, and a homeless dreg approached me.
"Spare some change good sir?"
How dare he request money from me? I who have less than him and more than him at the same time. I struck him on the head and he died right there. I feel no remorse for it, and will feel no repercussions because I left not a shred of evidence. Apollon, I think, knows what I did because he started questioning me about where I was that evening when I got home. Apollon may be wretched, but I believe he may be the one man who understands me because he is so good at manipulating me. Me, the unmanipulatable underground man. Apollon, I love him like a brother, I believe he may be my brother somehow.
I am sick of people, I am sick of these sheep, I am sick of these priests. Why should I follow these social conventions? I have a plan, I think I will walk around the city and chase people with a stick. I will call the stick some diminutive female name, and will converse with it because no one else is worthy of my time. Or is this a good idea? Sometimes I simply want to kill myself.
Ah suicide, such an appealing thought. I would do it nice and slowly, as to savor the feeling of the life leaving my body. I would slowly cut myself with a knife. I would start by disemboweling myself. I need to suffer in order to save the world for their sins. Or is it the world that needs to suffer for mine? Ah that wet snow would slowly start to melt while mixing with my warm blood. As my intestines were falling out of my soon to be deceased carcass, I would douse myself with kerosene and burn myself alive, to feel every inch of my skin be consumed. I would feel every part of my skin, my wounds, my eyes, my mouth, my hands; my everything would be consumed by flame. I would be lapped up by the warmth and comfort that even my own mother could never provide me. I would be gone, charred and finally gone from this wretchedness we call life. Gone…
You don't want this; you don't want this world or this life. This incense misting your eyes up with the red blood of the innocents. These homeless vagrants approaching you with desires that they could provide themselves somehow if they just did their personal duty. This world in which a man can be taken hostage and no one would ever even care. "But No Mr. Underground Man, no! You need to give people a chance to know that there is a hostage situation, the homeless man can't provide for himself, and religion has done more good than bad!"
Damn you all, damn you to hell, may you die, may you burn, and may you be ripped in half by the political machine that made you. God is not here in this world, and if he is he is smoking opium in a den in China. You people are weak, you are stupid, you are going to die, and hopefully at my hands. These past couple of months have hardened my soul. I cannot stand this any longer, may you all die and may I be the one to bring you to death. But I love you, I love you in a Christ like way, hurt me, hang me on a cross, nail me to it God damn it! Jesus was a sap, saving your soul; you weren't worth being saved because you let the devil buy the very soul that Christ allegedly saved. And Liza, that filthy whore, needs to stop thinking she's Mary Magdalene, because the fact is she is not. How dare she look at me with contempt! She will die too.
I need a hit list, people for me to kill. What is to be done? Kill them all, just rampage, kill, rip, murder, burn, rape, pillage, and let it be known that I am the alpha and the omega. I am it, let me be it. Stop trying to hold me down you horrible voices. These voices that you are all so jealous of are telling me to kill you all, and then they are telling me not to. These voices are a metaphor for my life. They are the dark signs that something is truly wrong, something has truly gone awry. The fact is, I cannot accept this life for what it is. I cannot bury my pain, I need to know, I need to let it all hang out because if I don't it will explode. Ah sleep, death, how I dream of my own demise, my own suffocation. May there never be another me, and may there never be another you.
You all have forsaken me; you have given me no choice but to label you all unforgiven. I have felt it, I have tasted the knowledge. They say truth, knowledge, and realities are better than a beautiful lie, I say that it is true, but at the same time false. No, no more of this hateful acceptance. No more of this, I am sober, I am true to my mind, and I know what is real. You cannot tell me that this is not real; you will never take me alive. So to death I nod my brow and say "Welcome my brother, let us play Russian roulette." Am I foolish or wise to play Russian roulette with my own soul? I take the revolver; I place the bullet into the open chamber, snap the chamber shut, spin the barrel, and let my troubles go to hell. I can't make this real, but I can destroy it. I will kill you before you kill me.
What is to be done? Kill, rip, tear, shred, split, destroy, annihilate, obliterate, extinguish. Imagine a world where there is neither heaven nor hell, the sky being just that, a blanket for our world, and the ground being the mattress of life, life would be just a plane of reality. Imagine there being no borders, no money, no currency, no wars, no murders, no martyrdom, no church to worry about, no ownership, no things to fight over, no pain. Dreamers have thought of these things, they have been killed for these dreams on street corners, in hotels, in their own homes, in parades, at public speeches, I will kill for them. These thoughts are not unique to me, I know it. I know that I am not the only one who is sick of this world being monotony. I was put in this world to answer the question of What is to be Done. Kill, kill the system, kill the people who are part of the system, kill the people who dare to disagree with the system. I am a good man, I am a true and honest man. And I must die for the sins of the world and the world must die for my sins.
I must do something for once and not remain this benign tumor on society. Let me be malignant! It is time for me to show my actions through words and my words through actions. I cannot kill the world but I can kill it's savior, me! I need to do this for posterity, that people may see that this dark underground cavern of my life means something because it is the only real thing left in this ungrateful world.
While many may not know about me or my actions or my deeds or my thoughts, those that will shall surely rue the day they rejected my ideals. I will no longer cower at the thought of true action and of true opinionating. But at the same time how can I? I rage against the knowledge that this may never be read, but no one can ever say that I was weak and indecisive again, I will do this right. What is to be Done? Either the system goes or I go, and the system is immovable, the system has grown greater than its members, greater that it's opposition, we will surely one day be a country of corruption and all enterprise will be divided amongst a couple of government officials who will be trying to kill each other off. This cannot be done, this cannot happen, I cannot let it happen, I will not be enslaved by life any longer. Crazy? Maybe but at least I am doing something. Apollon will know what to do with what I have left behind, and I will have that worthless whore Liza to mourn for me. The wet snow of my world will melt to give way to this new era of filth and muck.
But I am not done yet, no, I have more to say. The whispers of the forsaken call to me to speak for them, and I will answer. But I will do so in silence, in solitude and under the cover of my freedoms as a person. I will do so in my own death, in my own suicide, in the true nature of these Notes from Underground, as the note of my own suicide. I sit here with pen in one hand, and a box in the other hand. Allow me to divulge the contents of this box:
One dagger, razor sharp
One revolver with one bullet chambered
One tin of kerosene
Three matches
I begin my suicide by saying this: I am dying to show you all how committed I am to my cause, that life should be felt and not numbed by the common voice. That the man of nature and truth be allowed to exist. Now I feel the blade slicing into my stomach, ah the feeling is so sweet and real, I feel the blood being to well up at my feet, my intestines slowly start to ooze out of my body. Now for the kerosene, ah to finally do something to completion, to finally let go of this wretched life, I feel the warm kerosene dousing my body. Now to light myself, I will start on my feet. I feel the nerves in my legs firing, what a sweet sensation. Finally, Death, here goes the Russian roulette.
Click Click BANG!