Dostoevsky's "Notes from the Underground" and Sabato's "El Tunel"

Abstract

of contemporary existential literature and created his own synthesis of them. With regard to the question of originality, Sa-& bato states that absolute originality is impossible and that artistic creativity is at best a kind of extension of previous accomplishments carried out with genius.' El tuinel, his first novel published in 1948, would seem to bear out this view. Alberto Zum Felde, for example, has noted that the treatment of jealousy in El tuinel has a precedent in Tolstoy's Kreutzer Sonata.2 It has not been shown, however, that El tiinel is much more indebted to the other great Russian novelist, Dostoevsky. There is an especial similarity between El tuinel and Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground. The deranged murderer of Sabato's novel, Castel, clearly seems to be a twentieth-century version of Dostoevsky's underground man. Castel's role can be more fully understood in the light of the Dostoevskian protagonist. Although living almost a century apart, both characters suffer from hyperconsciousness, loss of identity, and extreme inability to communicate with other human beings. Their reactions to the situations in which they find themselves are surprisingly similar. They are constantly immersed in extraordinarily detailed rationalizations, but their logic leads them nowhere; they become rebels against society and even themselves, and in the end they bring harm to the only person with whom they could have established a successful human relationship. In the two novels the suffering of both protagonists finds its literary expression in a central metaphor of existential isolation, the underground and the tunnel. The fact that these two metaphors, derived from terms denoting subterranean separation from life, are interchangeable is the most obvious similarity of the two works. The most significant parallel, however, is their philosophical affinity.