When his imaginary audience ridicules him by laughing, saying "you will be finding enjoyment in a toothache next," the Underground Man develops this idea so as to show that science cannot predict a human being's reaction to pain or to anything else. Yet the Underground Man, in using the idea of the toothache, illustrates the fallacy of such attempts. Scientific rationalism, according to Dostoevsky, tries to categorize everything, place everything into its proper slot. He wonders if, ultimately, a man of acute consciousness and perception can ever respect himself. But as the ache continues for days, the moans become a desire to force others to suffer as you are suffering and the moans become "nasty, disgustingly malignant." Also, he knows that the audience for whom he is moaning only loathes him for his efforts, and from these recognitions comes a perverse pleasure. First of all, the moaning represents the intellect's inability to understand the aimlessness of pain. For example, why does a person moan with a toothache? If he did not find enjoyment in moaning, he would not moan.
The Underground Man maintains that there is even some type of enjoyment in a toothache.
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