The article explores some parallels between the C.J. Cela’s first tremendist novel The family of Pascual Duarte and F.M. Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. It shows a number of motifs of Dostoevsky’s ‘underground’ described in previous articles devoted to Notes from the Underground and its appropriation in the twentieth century, and also presented in The Family of Pascual Duarte. Special attention is paid to the convergences between the narrative of Notes from the Under-ground and one of The Family of Pascual Duarte. It is concluded that narrative complexity and some aspects of unreliable narrator are important characteristics of Cela’s novel. Pascual says nothing about social context of his crimes, but from the ‘editorial’ texts, which conclude his memoirs, it is clear that he acts during the civil war. Nevertherless the main character does not engage in direct confrontation with his opponents, and points of view shift portrays him as not lying, but isolated from the truth. His excessive self-reflexion is associated with his tryings to isolate his ‘self’ from any external reality. Driving into himself, he just excogitates some reasons for his feelings and actions. Such destruction of binary truthfalse opposition and deviation from the basic concepts are the foundation for internal antinomy of Cela’s utterance. Such novelist’s rhetoric determines the rhetoric of criticism dedicated to the novel, and the rhetoric of literary critics becomes a fertile ground for diametri-cally opposed understandings of the novel and definitions of the tremendism. Diametrically opposed definitions of tremendism capture it as a self-contradictory, negating and denying underground phenomenon.