The Direct Correlation of Intelligence and Prostitution: a brief analysis of the Sick Man

Sometimes, when one is dealing with a difficult situation, one might find the need to sleep with a prostitute. It might have the potential in aiding someone in reconciling whatever issues that they are facing. That was the approach that the Sick Man took in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. Throughout the novel, Dostoevsky tells the story of an unnamed man who worked as a civil servant in St. Petersburg. This man calls himself “a sick man… I am a wicked man. An unattractive man.” (P. 3) Throughout the book, this Sick Man tells the story of why he’s miserable and why everyone else should be miserable as well. He believes that he is enlightened and that he’s hated because of his enlightenment, but he’s fine with being hated because he hates everyone else too (P. 44). He employs certain methods to cope with his miserableness but none of them alieves his constant suffering. Despite his consistent blundering, he believes that in a perfect world, he would find success and blames the poor quality of his existence on the shortcomings of others. His attempts at attaining this elusive success involved believing that one should be intelligent and educated, believing that one should look down on anyone who isn’t as intelligent and educated, and to place one’s intelligence and education over happiness.

The Sick Man goes into detail about how his great intelligence and education have led to him being significantly more enlightened than the common man. He explains that he “always considered myself more intelligent than everyone around me, and, would you believe, have even felt slightly ashamed of it.” (P. 7) With every person he encountered as a civil servant, his belief that he was far superior to them was strengthened and he found pleasure in taking out his disdain on whichever innocent civilian that would approach him at work. “When petitioners would come for information to the desk where I sat - I’d gnash my teeth at them, and felt an inexhaustible delight when I managed to upset someone.” (P. 4) He later admits that he wishs he could have treated others with an aloof hostility but instead would chicken out at the last moment and shirk in their presence. This caused him intense emotional turmoil because even though his enlightenment made him, in his mind, superior, when he was confronted with these lower beings, he would cave before them.

Despite his apparently obvious education and intelligence, the Sick Man consistently failed to share his enlightenment with those he deemed as beneath him. Instead, his enlightenment festered in him like a thorn. He tells how he despised all of those around him because of their obvious shortcomings, such as a foul smell or an ugly face, and their lack of shame in their shortcomings. While the Sick Man was acutely aware of his shortcomings, these lower creatures were blissfully ignorant of how much better he was than them. And yet, he still craved their approval. He says, “Of course, I hated them all in our office, from first to last, and despised them all, but at the same time I was also afraid of them… now I despised them, now I set them above me.” His intelligence would cause him to look down on his peers, but his humanity would make him desire their acknowledgement of his superiority so much that it would cause him to concede his beliefs. Yet, he credited this cowardness to his decency. “Every decent man of our time is and must be a coward and a slave. That is his normal condition. I am deeply convinced of it.” (P. 44) This eased him of his responsibility to own his enlightenment. Surely, it didn’t matter if the presence of others caused him to lose his ability to even look them in the eye when they had no problem with meeting his glance because he was a decent man, and decent men are cowards.

The sick feeling that the Man felt from his cowardice and enlightenment cause him to be miserable, but he would never sacrifice his superiority for something in his opinion as trivial as happiness. He says, “The more conscious I was of the good and of all this ‘beautiful and lofty,’ the deeper I kept sinking into my mire, and the more capable I was of getting completely stuck in it.” (P. 7) He also shares his belief that consciousness, or enlightenment, of any type is a sickness and an elevated amount makes one even more miserable. He laments, “I am strongly convinced that not only too much consciousness but even any consciousness at all is a sickness.” (P. 7) The more enlightened he became, the more miserable he felt. It’s unclear whether he believed his enlightenment was the cause of his misery or his misery was the cause of his enlightenment, but there was a direct correlation that they both increased at the same rate.

Dostoevsky himself says in the closing notes of Notes from Underground that the Sick Man never really knew what he believed. He shares, “However, the ‘notes’ of this paradoxalist do not end here. He could not help himself and went on.” (P. 130) For example, the Sick Man tells the story of an attachment he formed with a prostitute named Liza. Whether he loved her for who she was or for what she could offer him, he couldn’t quite figure out, and it’s still unclear whether he loved her at all. Yet, he expresses emotion to this young woman, which causes him shame because, in his eyes, this is vulnerability. In an attempt to maintain his superiority over her, he lashes out at her, desperate to ilicit pain in her so he might have the upper hand again. This causes her to flee from him, and despite him running after her in a desperate attempt to win her back, he never sees her again. However, this pain the Sick Man felt could have been avoided if he had just committed to a belief. Dostoevsky uses this Sick Man to teach that enlightened or not, education is useless without the correct application, which in the Sick Man’s case involved kindness and humility.