Reading Notes W10: Notes from Underground, Part A

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, “Notes From Underground, Part 1. Ch. V” (631-708)

Fyodor Dostoyevsky:

·         1821-1881

·         Is the son of a doctor in Moscow.

·         He is the second of six children

·         At the lowest point of his bitter wandering, he composed “Notes From Underground”.

·         His characters are often damaged by violence, guilt, obsession, and addiction.

“Notes From Underground”:

·         The main character of this story questions what kind of human a person should be. This could be considered philosophical questioning.

·         The underground man, or narrator; alters between two things: “Between casting his intense self-awareness as unique and seeing it as a representative of all humanity” (634).

·         We see his own perspective throughout the story and later, his interactions/encounters with others.

·         Personally speaking, I think his views are rather depressing.

·         Important: “The ‘underground man’ is a new kind of rootless urban intellectual, bombarded with fashionably progressive ideas about science, who cannot reason his way to any kind of satisfying conclusion” (634).

·         Example of questioning what kind of human a person should be: “Not only couldn’t I become spiteful, I couldn’t become anything at all: neither spiteful nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect.” (636). to me, it seems he is struggling with what it means to be spiteful as a human and whether he is good or bad. This is where he comes to the conclusion, he is neither. He seems to view himself as depressingly ordinary.

·         “Oh, tell me who was first to announce, first to proclaim that man does nasty things simply because he doesn’t know his own true interest; and that if he were to be enlightened, if his eyes were to be opened to his true, normal interests, he would stop doing nasty things at once and would immediately become good and noble, because, being so enlightened and understanding his real advantage, he would realize that his own advantage really did lie in the good” (645). He thinks that a man would only be truly good if he was to be enlightened and once enlightened, he would stop doing nasty things and be good at once. All though that is how a human should truly be (good), this can be argued that once enlightened, that person might not change. At least that’s how I interpret it.