Notes From Underground

The narrator is fundamentally the darkest parts of every thinking man. A common theme is his vanity and resentment for all others that stemmed from intelectual superiority which resulted in no meaningful relationships and a deep sense of shame.

He was also passive with grand dreams of revenge without courage to act. It boiled down to belief. He didn’t [[believe]] in anything…much less himself and his own convictions. He lived in a sea of doubt and perpetual torment. In war with different parts of himself.

He couldn’t even accept the love of a woman without destroying that. Within us all there is a proclivity to destroy. He laid it out clearly in Part 1. Man does not always act in what would be “best” for him according to reason. But, man has an ultimate need to act as a man and do what is irrational just to prove he is independent and has his own will. –[[Irrational]]

We all are human and fallen. The sooner we really come to grips with that truth the sooner we can stop deceiving ourselves by holding ourselves to standard we just can’t live by. The danger with this is in giving yourself over to the fallenness. The narrator rightly said that Liza had sold her soul. But he had sold his own long before her by embracing The Underground and carrying spite as his ethos. There was a real close tie between how he ends the book and how [[Job]] complains about life being [[evil]] and consciousness as a curse upon man.

Definition of [[man]] according to the narrator: A being who walks on two legs and is ungrateful.

Reference

[[Dostoevsky]]