i feel like complaining about this book should be considered, like, the collegiate division of complaining about catcher in the rye. there's definitely an instinct in the culture to take issue with a narrator who's 'whiny', right? something about the protestant work ethic - even within a fictional narrative that represents the entirely internal monologue of a person who doesn't exist, we're looking for opportunities to say we've had worse, suck it up, do your job. the narrator here is obviously less sympathetic than holden - he's actively parasitic and cruel. he's whining about circumstances he's consciously chosen for himself - and he's conscious of that, too. he's conscious of every meta-layer of his own hypocrisy. but i'm not gonna complain about him. he's fascinating.
this is one of those characters (and one of those books) that can only really be attempted once, i think, or at least can't be attempted any more. Any contemporary author's attempt to update this hyper-aware death spiral of self-consciousness would feel a. out of time, not appropriate to 21st-century post-modernity, too evocative of real current social tendencies which would give the work an on-the-nose political tint, and b. obviously derivative. people will say it's taxi driver, or whatever - some piece of media that portrays the contemporary underground man as a criminal or vigilante, to spice him up a bit - but he's not that. he's underground. there's nobody to kill if you don't leave your house, and especially if you don't leave your own head.
this being set and written in tzarist russia lets the average idiot (i.e. me) divorce it from any socio-political trends of the time which may have mirrored those of our own time. i'm sure the actual political context has been analyzed to death and is fascinating. but at a first reading, we as contemporary readers aren't necessarily forced to think of the underground man as some proto-incel-neet-fascist. we can view him just as an avatar of latent human anxiety and misanthropy - someone who has, as he says at the very end, simply taken to an extreme certain behaviors and feelings in his own life that we try to conceal in ours.
as a clinically-socially-anxious person, there are vignettes here that are hard to read! if you don't see the worst version of yourself in the narrator's overanalysis of the way some guy brushes past him at a bar, spiraling into a weeks-long quest to walk past this stranger on the street in the most assertive way possible, to regain the social upper hand...you're probably more mentally sound than i'll ever be.
i have what i imagine is the most common take, which is: that whole like, manifesto part was real tough to get through, huh. still, i think it'll be worth a reread someday soon, now that i've read the second, more-narrative section. it feels like that's where you actually meet this guy - i.e. witness how his personality moves in the world. you find out about him what every anxious person already knows about themselves - he can construct a paranoid worldview that seems well-thought-out, self-conscious enough to cover every eventuality, to avoid every humiliation, but when he actually makes contact with the enemy (i.e. any other human being), the results of acting on that social strategy are inevitably more pathetic than if he hadn't thought things out at all. so that's my professional literary critic's take on what ol fyodor is telling us here. never think!