The
man and the mouse metaphor mirror the situation of the underground man as a
result of his level of consciousness and understanding. Dostoyevsky addresses
why the mouse seeks to revenge itself and vent it’s spite to the man. In truth,
the mouse is not seeking revenge on the man, but on himself. This is a result
of the presence of everlasting spite on the entirety of its existence. Because
of his level of consciousness is left with the unsettling fact that he is
ultimately the mouse in every situation and this concept drives the underground
man to extreme despair. However in the mist of his growing contempt, there is a
sense of strange enjoyment. He compares this enjoyment to being slapped in the
face, in which the victim feels the pain, yet gratification because his
existence has been validated and he knows the truth behind the act of revenge.
Continuing
on, Dostoyevsky writes, “The impossible means the stone wall!”. With every
thought of the impossible, a wall is formed. In this paragraph, the stonewall
is the laws the nature. Dostoyevsky references evolution as an example of how
we have built a wall and accepted it, to block the view of the truth of the
situation- that we don’t know sh*t. As discussed before, walls are continually
built to justify our situation, to make sense of the world around us. And
because we fear the unanswerable we readily accept information that makes even
the slightest sense to us. We mentally cannot break down these walls because
they are ingrained in us. We also find ourselves blaming these walls for the
things around us, however we are the ones to blame because we built them to
begin with and we will continue to do so. This concept brings us to the
undeniable, imperishable ache within us. It is the ache that will never find
the object to relieve its spite on. And the more conscious one becomes the more
the ache grows. This ache is infinite because what we don’t know is infinite.
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