Notes from Underground

Dostoevsky's 1864 novella narrated by the 'underground man' — an embittered minor official in St. Petersburg who is simultaneously hyper-conscious and paralyzed, who needs the recognition of others and resents them for it — which Girard identified as the purest literary expression of mimetic desire.

Creates the underground man as the psychological type whose entire consciousness is organized around the Other's gaze — he simultaneously craves and despises recognition, is paralyzed by self-consciousness, and cannot perform the simplest social action without it becoming a referendum on his worth — making it the literary anatomy of mimetic desire.