Like the Pope, he is cast off in isolation, but willingly so. Like the Pope he has lost his occupation -- but again, willingly so as he has been able to retire from his former civil service job. He has chosen to live underground, that is, away from other people. Over the course of the novel, he self-fashions himself as a superior person. He sees himself as well-read, cultivated, and above the minutia of everyday existence. However, the reader likely sees him differently. Left with nothing to believe in, the Underground Man simply inflicts his purposelessness, bottled sense of rage against himself, forcing himself to suffer needless physical and psychological pain. He is physically constrained, like the Pope, but by his own will, and his decision to deny God has made him less mobile, less free, in contrast to what advocates of religious denial might suggest. The modern project of denying the supposed constraints of faith actually takes away all freedom of the human will, Dostoevsky suggests in his portrayal of the Underground Man.

Both short works begin, not in the middle of the action, but with a detailed character sketch. The tales only begin to shift to action in the middle, after fully explicating the significance of the main character. In the case of the Pope, the main character is passive, and events happen to him, given his constrained state under a totalitarian regime. Dostoevsky's protagonist writes in his own voice, as if speaking to the reader in the voice of an angry, rambling manifesto that seems to have little narrative purpose, other than to show different facets of the character, and different aspects of his embittered point-of-view. The most animated discussion occurs not during the Underground Man's discussion with an individual, but with himself, as he rages against the ability of human beings to have free will and to know their best interests. This...

Dostoevsky returns to the past, rather than propels the Underground Man's narrative forward, or envisions a life without faith. In the second section, the younger, hopeful Underground Man is shown in a futile quest to rehabilitate a prostitute, and is spurned by his friends and any contact he does seek with humanity. This provides a clue to the Underground Man's sense of a lack of a personal connection with others. But rather than find a belief structure to give him some sort of connection, instead the man takes refuge in total disconnection from everything.
Dostoevsky's novella is perhaps the more experimental of the two works, even though it is older. It disdains formal narrative at all, and is mainly episodic. It contains long, searching passages of philosophical exploration and psychological excavation, but fights against encouraging the reader to identify with the main character's thoughts and feelings, unlike traditional first-person 19th century narrative. The reader is moved to reject a life similar to the Underground Man's, and instead choose a life of faith over a life narrowly based upon self-interest and philosophical ideals. Greene's more straightforward cautionary tale of a dark future has a clear beginning, middle, and end, almost like parable. Yet it retains a modernist focus on the individual over plot and a modernist sense of fragmentation in the sparseness of the prose and its clarity of style and incident. It has the same message and meaning as Notes from the Underground, namely it carries a warning against trying to construct a future in the absence of a sense of the divine.