Summary Of 'Apropos Of Wet Snow'

The Underground Man is representative of a modern man who rejects the values of Russian society at the time for being so artificial. In the beginning of Chapter I of Part II, the Narrator speaks extensively of his relationship with literature. He’s very well-read, and prides himself in that fact. However, much of the French and German texts that he read in his youth were influenced heavily by Romanticism. He makes it clear that Russian ideals have no room for such Romantic notions, because he know from experience. When he tried to apply French and German Romanticism to his life in Russia, it didn’t work. The failure of the ideals he found in European literature in his life serve as another reason why he went “underground”. This helps illustrate …show more content…
He had described that it was his consciousness that causes his inability to decide a course of action. He asserts that intelligence must cause such indecisiveness in everyone in the modern era, not just himself. The narrator must be positive that he’s doing the absolute best thing he can before being able to take action, but as mentioned earlier, it’s impossible to do so in his mind. Everything is subjective, even logic and the laws of nature, and he claims that any intelligent man will be aware that he has no concrete reason to take action. The conflict with the officer in “Apropos of Wet Snow” shows an early case of the narrator’s thought process behind this notion, which is now solidified in the present as he writes “Underground”.
The narrator’s conflict with the officer is also symbolic of the obsession that the narrator has with the notion of the “man of nature and truth”. This man, the officer, is an unconscious man of action, the antithesis of the narrator. He’s healthy, “narrow-minded”, and acts according to the laws of nature. The narrator resents the officer’s rank, wealth, and confidence, but these attributes also intimidate him, which is another reason why he can’t confront