His justification for writing these Notes from Underground is that every man has some memory which he wishes to purge from his being, and the Underground Man is going to tell his most oppressing memory. The Underground Man concludes that for the man of conscious intelligence, the best thing to do is to do nothing.

What the Underground Man wants is not scientific certainty, but the freedom to choose his own way of life. Many people, for example, need to suffer and are ennobled by suffering yet, the scientist and the rationalist want to remove suffering from their utopian society, thereby removing something that man passionately desires. The Underground Man then points out that some people love things which are not to their best advantage. But the history of man proves that he seldom acts this way. Such a society would have to be formulated on the theory that man is a rational being who always acts for his best advantage. The Underground Man objects to this trend because he maintains that no one can actually know what is man's best advantage. Yet in society, the scientists and the materialists are trying to define exactly what a man is in order to create a society which will function for man's best advantage. It is easy for other people to classify themselves, but the Underground Man knows that no simple classification can define the essence of one's existence therefore, he can only conclude that he is nothing. By this time it is ridiculous to try and perform any act of revenge. Such a man is plagued with an active imagination which causes him to exaggerate any type of insult until it becomes fantasized out of all proportion to the original insult. The man of acute consciousness finds that he cannot even commit an act of revenge because he never knows the exact nature of the insult. In contrast, a person who is not very intelligent can constantly perform all sorts of actions because he never bothers to consider the consequences. This is because he is a man of acute consciousness and such a person is automatically rendered inactive because he considers too many consequences of any act before he performs the act and therefore never gets around to doing anything. Then he suddenly admits that he is not really spiteful, because he finds it is impossible to be anything - he can't be spiteful or heroic he can only be nothing. The narrator introduces himself as a man who lives underground and refers to himself as a spiteful person whose every act is dictated by his spitefulness.

Dostoevsky notes