The Underground Men

My last post was also about The Twilight Zone, but I have another episode I think compares well to the Under Ground man himself. (I've been watching the show a lot recently, hehe.) There was a man who built an underground bunker and invited several people from his past to attend a dinner. One person was an old teacher, and another was an army officer who was above him, for example. He had wanted to exact revenge on all these people for things they saw as insignificant, but which he never forgot. His plan was to trick them into thinking the world was in danger from an atomic bomb (he went really far, just as the Underground man does with his plans for acknowledgement.) and that they had to stay in his underground shelter. They all refuse to stay regardless of the threat because they have people above they want to get to and other places they rather be; the man is left alone, and there is destruction, in the end, because its a kind of creepy in-between world and the bomb may or may not have really happened. (The Twilight Zone is meant to kind of trick your mind.) This man reminded me of the Underground Man; he holds serious grudges against old school peers even though they probably rarely ever think of him. He things the police man is intentionally refusing to acknowledge him when he's probably just focused on other things. Much of this comes from his own sense of unworthiness or accomplishment; just as the Twilight Zone man was left alone in the end, still not valued by anyone whom he had gone so far to try and provoke or get attention from, the Underground Man feels forgotten and isolated.