The Man of Action (the “Direct Person”)

The Man of Action (the “Direct Person”) is the Underground Man’s emblem of unhesitating agency: a person who pursues an object with the force of an infuriated bull and encounters an obstacle as a stopping point rather than an invitation to reconsider. The Underground Man regards this figure as the “real normal man,” envies him, and calls him stupid; but the judgment is unsettled. The direct person’s limitation may be precisely what allows him to act, while reflection leaves the Underground Man unable to move. Later, the image itself opens onto a paradox: even the practical person may suspect that building a road matters more than reaching its destination.

Identity and the Wall

The direct person is introduced through the imagined experience of revenge. When revenge possesses him, nothing else fills his being; he dashes toward its object as though charging with lowered horns. Only a wall stops him. The simile makes action bodily and directional: the direct person does not first turn the pursuit into a question about himself, but presses ahead until an external limit intervenes.

The wall separates him from the reflective person as much as it obstructs him. For the direct person, it is not an excuse to evade action, but a genuinely perplexing, calming, and final fact, perhaps even something mysterious. The Underground Man contrasts this response with that of people who think and therefore do nothing: they welcome the wall as a reason to turn aside, while scarcely believing their own excuse. The same obstacle thus confirms two different habits of mind. One accepts a limit as decisive; the other converts it into a pretext and remains entangled in doubt.

Normality, Envy, and Consciousness

The Underground Man calls the direct person the normal man nature intended to bring into the world. He immediately complicates this apparent praise by admitting that he envies him “till I am green in the face,” while insisting that the man is stupid. He even entertains the possibility that normality itself may require stupidity. His envy is therefore not a simple endorsement: it registers the cost of an agency that does not subject every motive and obstacle to endless examination, and the attraction of being able to proceed without that burden.

Against this figure stands the man of acute consciousness, whom the Underground Man imagines as made not by nature but in a retort. Confronted by his antithesis, this over-conscious person may think of himself as a mouse rather than a man. The contrast turns a difference in temperament into a difference in felt scale: the direct person fills the scene with forward force, while the reflective person experiences himself as small and compromised before an obstacle.

Revenge and the Difference Between Acting and Thinking

The difference becomes morally visible in revenge. The direct person sees justice in his retaliation and, because he accepts that explanation as primary, can act calmly and successfully. The Underground Man’s mouse may feel an even more rancorous desire to vent spite on an assailant, yet acute consciousness prevents him from believing in the justice of that act. His doubts multiply around the original grievance, mixing questions, emotions, and the contempt of the direct men who stand around him. The impulse does not disappear; it becomes harder to enact and less possible to regard as righteous.

The Underground Man extends this account from revenge to action in general. He says that direct people act because they are stupid and limited: they mistake immediate and secondary causes for primary ones, then more quickly persuade themselves that they have found an infallible basis for what they do. With a settled explanation, their minds are at ease, which the Underground Man identifies as the chief thing. The reflective person, by contrast, sees the chain of causes extending toward infinity. Consciousness does not deliver a more secure foundation for action; in this account, it prevents any foundation from feeling final.

Inertia and the Limits of the Ideal

The Underground Man names the consequence of this reflective excess as inertia, or “conscious sitting-with-the-hands-folded.” He recalls trying twice to fall in love and suffering jealousy, but says that his suffering carried a faint undertow of mockery and arose from boredom; in the end, inertia overcame him. This episode gives the contrast a personal consequence: the ability to experience intense feeling does not itself produce decisive action. Reflection can leave desire and emotion present while withholding the uncomplicated commitment that would turn them into movement.

Yet the direct person is not presented as a complete answer to paralysis. The later image of a person predestined to strive consciously toward an object and to engineer new roads, wherever they lead, shifts attention from the fixed goal to the making of a route. Even the practical person may sometimes want to go off at a tangent, perhaps because the process of making the road matters more than its destination. This possibility prevents the figure from being reduced to mere obedience to a purpose: his characteristic movement can include a turn away from the expected line.

The contrast therefore remains deliberately unstable. The Underground Man envies the direct person’s ability to act, but reads that ability as founded on limitation; acute consciousness sees more, yet turns that breadth of vision into hesitation. At the same time, the road-making image suggests that action need not depend solely on a final, unquestioned destination. The direct person serves both as the Underground Man’s imagined opposite and as a test of what his own reflection has cost him: not insight alone, but the capacity to begin and continue.