Examining the Intellectual Elitism of the Anti-Hero in No Longer Human and Notes from the Underground

Abstract

This paper presents a comparative analysis of Osamu Dazai’s Yozo Oba from No Longer Human and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Underground Man from Notes From the Underground focusing on the paradoxical relationship between acute self-loathing and intellectual elitism. While both narrators position themselves as ‘disqualified’ or ‘spiteful’ outcasts, this study argues that their profound sense of alienation serves as a tool for asserting moral and intellectual superiority over the ‘normal’ man. By employing a framework of hyper-consciousness and existentialist critique, the research explores how Yozo’s performative clowning and the Underground Man’s aggressive isolation function as defenses against a society they perceive as intellectually shallow.

The analysis examines the ‘Superfluous Man’ archetype in both 19th-century Russia and post-war Japan, illustrating how both authors use the anti-hero to challenge Enlightenment ideals of progress and logic. Ultimately, the paper concludes that for these protagonists, the refusal to participate in the ‘human’ collective is not a failure of character, but a deliberate, elitist retreat into the sovereignty of the self. This ‘aristocracy of misery’ suggests that in the modernist tradition, to be "less than human" is, ironically, to be more than the masses.