Public space in fiction serves as a means of identifying aspects of the characters of the people who inhabit those spaces. The characters in Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky, L'Assommoir by Emile Zola, and Last Nights of Paris by Philippe Soupault also illustrate multiple social meanings and serve as a means for the authors to criticize their own society.
The theory of human nature and the meaning of life that is offered by the Underground Man in Notes from Underground derives from his personality and his particular experiences in the world. Those experience have left him angry and spiteful, and in part his "theory" of human nature is a spiteful reaction to the way he himself has been treated. He seems obsessed with developing this theory, as if he will be able to codify all human conduct and explain it by means of his view of why people behave in a certain way. This theory takes on a particular resonance because of the man who delivers it. He explains this theory to the reader, and as he does so he also tells much about his experiences, those that shaped his philosophy and contributed to his theory. The Underground Man has no name and is only known as The Underground Man, further removing him from the world of "normal" humans. He is the outsider, the observer. He celebrates his differences with the world, and in so doing he affirms the importance of freedom. He is an unpleasant man in many respects, yet the reader is wooed into being on his side as far as much of his philosophy is concerned, wooed into seeing the importance of freedom and how that is represented in the life of the Underground Man.
The Underground Man refuses to be bound by the restrictions most men adhere to because they are rational and desire to maintain that rationality. The Underground Man attacks the different sources of rational thought, beginning with science and extending through the laws and regulations that govern society its...