fly

The fly is a recurring image of the Underground Man’s perceived social insignificance and self-conscious isolation. It gathers together moments in which he feels unnoticed or pushed aside, while the narrator’s insistence that he is more intelligent and refined than those who slight him makes the comparison double-edged: the image conveys humiliation, but also the pride with which he interprets it.

The Officer’s Unnoticed Gesture

At a billiard table, the Underground Man stands in the way of an officer who wants to pass. The officer takes him by the shoulders and moves him elsewhere without warning or explanation, then continues as though he has not noticed him. The physical gesture is slight, but its manner is decisive: the Underground Man says he could have forgiven blows, yet cannot forgive being moved without recognition. He longs for a “real regular quarrel,” even one more “LITERARY,” because open conflict would at least acknowledge him as an opponent. Instead, he has been treated like a fly.

The comparison measures the gap between the encounter as an ordinary practical act and the significance the Underground Man gives it. The officer is over six feet tall and the narrator describes himself as spindly; their physical difference sharpens the image of being effortlessly displaced. What wounds him most, however, is not simply the unequal force but the absence of any exchange. He turns a passing movement into a grievance because invisibility, rather than a direct insult, is the offense he cannot accept.

A Self-Image on the Nevsky

The fly returns in the narrator’s recollection of going to the Nevsky, where he feels drawn to appear despite the distress it causes him. He describes his poorly regarded appearance and small, hurried figure as a source of continuing humiliation. That distress becomes the direct sensation of being a “mere fly in the eyes of all this world,” a creature continually making way for everyone and feeling insulted and injured by them.

The image does not make him simply humble or self-effacing. In the same account, he qualifies the comparison by claiming greater intelligence, development, and refinement of feeling than those around him. The contradiction is central: he sees himself as socially negligible but inwardly superior. The fly expresses both his exposure to other people’s judgments and his effort to reverse their hierarchy in his own mind. His repeated visits to the Nevsky, despite not knowing why he goes, give this painful self-perception a recurrent setting rather than a single cause or resolution.

The Former Schoolmates’ Regard

At a reunion with former schoolmates, the Underground Man again interprets others’ lack of attention through the fly image. They scarcely notice his entrance, although he has not met them for years; he concludes that they regard him as no more significant than a common fly. He contrasts their response with school, where they hated him, and attributes their present contempt to his lack of success in the service and his poor dress.

The recurrence connects the officer’s silent displacement to a later social encounter: in both, the narrator experiences disregard as a denial of his standing. Yet the reunion also shows how the image can express an interpretation, not merely an observable action. He sees his former classmates’ inattention as evidence of contempt and links it to his diminished circumstances. The fly thus becomes a compact figure for a larger pattern in his account: he seeks recognition from people whose indifference he experiences as proof that he has been reduced to something beneath notice.

Narrative Function

Across these episodes, the fly image makes a recurring grievance legible without resolving the tension that sustains it. The Underground Man objects to being passed over, yet turns that injury into a private drama of comparison, asserting his refinement even as he describes himself as continually yielding. The distinction between being openly opposed and being treated as insignificant matters more to him than the physical act alone. By returning to the same small creature in different social settings, the narrative shows how one experience of disregard becomes a lens through which he reads later encounters.