With his short existentialist novel Notes from Underground, Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky created a prototype for a new kind of protagonist that would arise in the latter part of the 20th century and usher in what many label a new phase of modernism. The "underground man" of Dostoevsky's novel is defined by his alienation, spitefulness, and isolation from the world around him. He is brilliant and rebellious, yet tragically self-destructive and misguided. He was the antithesis of the romantic adventurer and dashing Byronic hero that preceded him in literature.
Many critics agree that the single most vivid cinematic exemplar of the "underground man" is Travis Bickle, the protagonist of Taxi Driver. Indeed, New Yorker critic Pauline Kael titled her glowing review of the film, "Underground Man." Author Branimir Rieger has asserted that the "underground man" is a rebellious archetype that writers turn to as a mechanism for revealing the irreconcilability between the values that define a culture and an individual’s political convictions or social consciousness. Underground men start out as an observers and slowly build a resentment that threatens to erupt into violence. When the violence does occur, the underground man's actions force the audience or reader to critically question the conventions of the dominant culture.
Such a description certainly seems to apply to Travis Bickle. Anti-social and paranoid, Travis Bickle feels a certain moral righteousness and disdains mainstream society, but his spitefulness and alienated perspective make him bigoted and messy. He wants to save the people, but he contradicts himself when he expresses the desire for a rain to wash all the filth and corruption off the streets. By the end of the film, Travis has half-heartedly attempted to assassinate a presidential candidate and violently murdered an assortment of pimps, pushers and johns, as he rescues a teenage girl from a life of prostitution. His actions are heralded in the press and he becomes something of a folk hero in New York. Travis completes the arc of the underground man, reflecting the skewed and corrupt values of his society back at itself to great acclaim.
Travis Bickle is, like the "underground man," corrupted by his own self-righteousness and self-regard, dangerously flawed and out of touch. When his flaws and prejudices are most glaring, he sounds like a gun-hoarding paranoiac and white supremacist. As he complains about “the buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies," refers to black people as "spooks," and looks suspiciously and angrily at the black people surrounding him, we see that he picks routine conservative targets, rather than blaming a system that itself oppresses minorities.
Objectively, Travis rescues a young girl from prostitution, an unambiguously moral act, but his work proves to be a dangerous act of vigilantism, and the audience watches the bloodbath in the brothel wondering if his violent act is ultimately the most traumatizing event in Iris's life. What if Travis had not been so lucky? What if one of the many bullets he fires to save Iris had actually hit Iris herself? Travis Bickle is the quintessential "underground man," an antihero mistaken for a hero, a vigilante valorized as a saint.
