In Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground, the man from the underground struggles between two opposing beliefs. The first recognizes that its fictional existence was predetermined, subject to the behavior of its author. It is the subterranean man's insistence that the only possible world where humans can live is an indeterminate world that exalts and situates free will in humans. In order to try to solve this problem, the underground man turns to writing, to try to be honest with himself, to understand why he is the way he is and to not reject any truth that presents itself, horrifying or not. . Through this exercise, he realizes that his self-awareness highlights how little control he has over his actions, even though he continues to believe in free will. This understanding within the underground man and this acceptance on the part of the reader, humbly engenders, brings what I believe to be a message of humility to the now hardened reader, who, after reading Notes from Underground, returns to his own indeterminate world with a new sense of duty. In the section entitled “Underground”, the underground man discusses the notion of determinism. He states that by accepting this theory, a person's actions are devoid of any ulterior motive. “That is to say, in life itself, [it] must be nothing other than two times two equals four – it is a formula; and twice two is no longer the life of a gentleman, but the beginning of death” (p. 32). Moreover, believing that two times two equals four and that the result of four is immutable in the distant future is something that the underground man refutes. For a person's life to have meaning or validity, actions must be considered non-robotic; an answer to this question must not only be unknown, but more imp...... middle of paper ......nd. The Underground Man concludes that it is impossible to discover oneself without feeling fear, and that the possibility of feeling fear does not give an excuse not to try, even if one is in a book. But we are not the underground man. We are not characters in a book. We can sense words and provoke actions that transcend them. Our consciousness will never allow us to understand the complexity of life; we do not live in a double world. If our future seems doomed, we have time on our hands and the ability to use it to change. This concept is difficult to live with. This results in the rarest of pains: the kind that can only be eliminated through acceptance and action. However, once the pain subsides, you will emerge from this broken trellis once called the underground, with a deeper and clearer understanding of what you are, we all are...