Enjoyment in Toothache

Enjoyment in Toothache is the Underground Man’s paradoxical account of pain converted into spiteful pleasure. Toothache subjects the sufferer to bodily necessity, but heightened self-consciousness gives him a bleak substitute for control: he can make his pain audible, burden those around him, and take satisfaction in their disbelief and irritation.

The Argument of Chapter IV

The idea emerges in Chapter IV as an answer to an imagined reader who laughs that the Underground Man will next find enjoyment in toothache. He replies that even toothache can contain enjoyment and grounds the claim in experience: he once suffered from it for a whole month. The reply is not a simple celebration of suffering. It is an analysis of how pain, awareness, and spite can become entangled when pain itself offers no useful action or relief.

The Underground Man distinguishes these moans from candid expressions of distress. The sufferer does moan, but the moaning is malignant: its point is not only to express pain but to make the pain troublesome to other people. In his formulation, the sufferer’s enjoyment becomes audible in the very sound that seems to testify only to misery. Without that enjoyment, he suggests, the man would not moan in this particular way.

Pain, Nature, and Powerlessness

The moans expose the pain’s aimlessness, which is humiliating to consciousness. The sufferer may disdain nature’s legal order, yet remains subject to it; while the tooth continues to ache, contempt cannot free him from the body. The passage makes that dependence sharply concrete: the teeth might stop if someone wished it, or keep aching for another three months if they did not. The sufferer has no power to determine the duration of his pain.

That helplessness narrows the available gestures of resistance. If he remains defiant, the Underground Man says, he can thrash himself or strike the wall with his fist as hard as possible, but he can do nothing more to alter the toothache. Pain therefore becomes an insult that the sufferer cannot answer on its own terms. Its arbitrary persistence makes resistance look futile, yet the consciousness of that futility does not extinguish the impulse to retaliate.

The Audience of the Moans

The imagined audience gives the suffering its spiteful dimension. The Underground Man asks readers to listen to an educated man of the nineteenth century on the second or third day of an attack, when the pain has continued long enough for the performance around it to become conspicuous. The sufferer knows that his family and the people listening are loath to hear him and do not believe his moans. He also knows that he could moan more simply, without the “trills and flourishes” that make his distress sound elaborately staged.

That knowledge turns the sound into a deliberate aggravation. The sufferer’s moaning tells his listeners, in effect, that he is keeping them awake and making them share each minute of his toothache. They hear not merely pain but a performance whose excess they recognize and condemn. Their contempt does not end the performance; it becomes part of what makes it satisfying. The sufferer can no longer command his teeth, but he can impose his presence on the household and make others endure an echo of his helplessness.

Humiliation as a Substitute for Agency

The pleasure described here depends on a contradiction. The sufferer is humiliated because pain proves his dependence on an impersonal natural order, and because his audience sees through the affected quality of his moans. Yet that same exposure supplies the material for a small, hostile power: he can knowingly trouble those who despise the display. The Underground Man calls the resulting pleasure voluptuous, even at its highest intensity, not because toothache is relieved but because humiliation and retaliation have become inseparable.

The example condenses a wider pattern in the Underground Man’s account of consciousness. Awareness does not grant mastery over the body or produce a practical remedy. Instead, the sufferer observes his own powerlessness, recognizes how others judge him, and turns that recognition into a spiteful relation with them. The moan is at once a symptom of pain and a gesture directed at its witnesses. Its pleasure is therefore real within the account, but it remains captive to the condition that produces it: the tooth still aches, nature remains indifferent, and the sufferer’s victory consists only in making the household feel the duration of his defeat.