These themes include alienation, despair, and the questioning of the Notes from Underground, one of Dostoyevsky's earlier novels, anticipates themes of his later works. This section focuses on the underground man's feelings of social humiliation and subsequent alienation, and on his encounter with a prostitute whom he implores to seek a better life. It relates the events that led to the underground man's literal and metaphorical retreat underground. The second section is written as a narrative rather than in the stream-of-consciousness style of the first section, and the events that unfold therein take place prior to the first section. (Existentialism is a school of philosophical thought that stresses the essential freedom of an individual and asserts that truth is subjective and can be arrived at not through rational thought but through personal experience.) The narrator of Notes from Underground remains unnamed throughout the novel, and is referred to by critics as 'the underground man.' The novel is broken into two sections, the first being the underground man's philosophical discussions of such ideas as consciousness, isolation, and inertia. It is often regarded as a precursor to the existentialist novel. Zapiski iz podpol'ia, which was later translated as Notes from Underground (and also translated as Notes from the Underground), is a first-person novel written in a confessional style, and it is one of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's (also known as Dostoevsky) most philosophical works.

The underground man dostoevsky