“Even in a toothache there is enjoyment.” This is the perspective of the narrator in Notes from the Underground, perhaps the most spiteful narrator in all of literature. The creation of Fyodor Dostoevsky, the so-called Underground Man takes pleasure in his bad liver, in his bad choices, and in his misery. Why? To defy rational self-interest and the possibility of a perfectible future.
According to the narrator, a toothache is not only a good occasion for “malignant moans,” but something more. He suggests that “those moans express in the first place all the aimlessness of your pain, which is so humiliating to your consciousness; the whole legal system of nature on which you spit disdainfully, of course, but from which you suffer all the same while she does not.” There is more, those moans “express the consciousness that you have no enemy to punish, but that you have pain.” The modern world has mastered so much, but “you are still in complete slavery to your teeth.”
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