Generally referred to by reviewers as the Underground Man, the novella offers itself as a passage from the memoirs of a retired government worker residing in St. Petersburg, a bitter, solitary, anonymous narrator. Though the initial section of the novella has the shape of a monologue, the narrator's approach to addressing his reader is somewhat dialogized. Mikhail Bakhtin said in the Underground Man's confession, "There is not a single monologically strong, undissociated word." Every word the Underground Man speaks reflects the words of someone with whom he is in an intense mental quarrel. The Underground Man attacks modern Russian philosophy, specifically Nikolay Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done? In a broader sense, the book challenges and rebels against determinism, a theory that reduces everything, including human personality and will, to the laws of nature, science, and mathematics.
The Underground Man's narration is rife with ideological allusions and complex conversations about the political climate of the time. Using his fiction as a weapon of ideological discourse, Dostoevsky challenges the ideologies of his time, mainly nihilism and rational egoism. The novel rejects the rationalist assumptions that underlie Jeremy Bentham's utilitarian social philosophy.