Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The Underground Man is alone because he has chosen to be; he is hyper-conscious, meaning he is too aware and over analyses everything – his biggest worries are petty compared to what is going around him. As a society, we worry so much about ourselves and our own persona, we sometimes become paranoid. A perfect example is given when the Underground Man is on the verge of having dinner with his old comrades and he notices a stain on his trousers “The worst of it was that on the knee of my trousers was a bug yellow stain. I had a foreboding that that stain deprive me of nine-tenths of my personal dignity.” (NU 48) He immediately panics as he worries about whether his friends will see it, and goes as far as to consider forgetting dinner because he is so embarrassed. As shameful as it is to admit, we too have reached the point where we are so concerned with out outer appearance that we let it dominate most of our life – there are several instances where we dictate who we associate with and who we befriend based on their appearance. He is severely misanthropic, marked by hatred, distrust, and disdain toward the human race; he believes himself to be more intelligent and perceptive than most other people, and this contrast with the fact that he despises himself and frequently feels inferior or humiliated. Due to his lack of loving relationship growing up, he goes through life full of shame and self loathing, often falling into existentialism. The Underground Man’s urge for

The battle between society and man, the social creature, would be a definition of social alienation. As a result of the wounds casted upon a man from society, that man begins to alienate himself and retreat. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in “Notes from Underground,” shows us the Underground Man who, after expecting the world to work like it does in literature, finds himself being isolated for the last twenty years of his life. Ralph Ellison, in “Invisible Man,” shows us an Invisible Man who, in the beginning has social hopes and aspirations, eventually becomes completely alienated on. While Dostoyevsky and Ellison show us somebody alienated from society in different eras and environment, they differ on why one becomes alienated.

Tolstoy talks about a sort of scholarly emergency that he endured late in his life, and his recuperation from it. In spite of the fact that Tolstoy appreciated what might conventionally be viewed as a successful and agreeable life, he started feeling tormented by worries of unimportance. Specifically, he reports starting to question why he should think about things that he once thought about, or why he should do the things that he would choose to do. At last, he discovered it inconceivably hard to give answers to these inquiries. The outcome, he reports, is feeling as though his life were a doltish, pointless trap played someone has bestowed upon him. He felt as though every individual task he attempted, and also his life in its totality, were without importance.

Viktor E. Frankl, an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist who also had survived the Holocaust, writes “When we are no longer able to change a situation – we are challenged to change ourselves” (BrainyQuote). Frankl survived genocide against his own people and still chose to have a positive outlook on it because he understands that if he did not, he would continually live an unhappy, upset life. Like Frankl, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, the main character in One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, contains a similar outlook to that of Frankl. The novel takes place during Soviet Russia in a gulag in Siberia, or otherwise known as a labor work camp. The whole book is about only one day that Shukhov lives; from 5 in the morning to 10 at night and all that happens in between. In this labor camp, not only are the weather conditions very cold, making it difficult to work in such circumstances, but also the workers are punished and harshly treated if they do not obey the guards. When placed in this environment, it is easy to be discouraged and miserable, but instead of facing the negatives of his situation, Shukhov remains affirmative in his thoughts – which are most important in order to survive not only physically, but also mentally. This stoicism portrayed in the narrative can also be found in Epictetus’s work, The Handbook. In this text, Epictetus discusses how he believes people can live a happy life, despite the hard conditions they are put through

The book I read for my Political Science class was In God's Underground, by Richard Wurmbrand.

Throughout the entirety of Dostoevsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamazov, the author chooses to insert lines of poetry in order to give more insight to the situations he is portraying. Out of all of the Russian poems that were referenced, this paper will be focusing on the five that, I feel, were the most crucial to the deeper understanding of the scenes in which they were placed. These poems; Lermontov’s “Do not, do not believe in yourself,” Pushkin’s “Demon,” Pushkin’s “Chill Winds Still Blow,” Tiutchev’s “Silentium,” and Nekrasov’s “Before the Rain” will be discussed. Each of these poems offers insight to the scene, which goes beyond what was explicitly written by Dostoevsky. “Do not, do not believe in yourself” gives deeper insight to the

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich concentrates on one man, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, as he lives through one day in a Soviet gulag. The conditions of the camp are harsh, illustrating a world that has no tolerance for independence. Camp prisoners depend almost totally on each other's productivity and altruism, even for the most basic human needs. The dehumanising atmosphere of the gulag ironically forces prisoners to discover means to retain their individuality while conforming to the harsh rules, spoken and unspoken, of the camp. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich serves as a powerful reminder of the resilience of the human spirit. Solzhenitsyn provides his

The novel ‘Notes From the Underground’, written by philosopher Fyodor Dostoyevsky, is a narration of ideology and life experience written by a male character who calls himself the underground man. The underground man’s ideology is a personalized application of Kierkegaard’s existentialist theory to his life. It is my belief that the underground creates this ideology after learning of his imminent death from liver disease in order to prove to himself that his life was successful and

One night, the Underground Man, the protagonist in Notes from Underground, saw a man being thrown out of a window of a bar. Right then and there, he decided he wanted to be thrown out the bar window because the event had been normalized to him. He saw the occurrence as a frequent incident of the space and decided that he too wanted to be thrown out of a window to be included. The Underground Man stated: “…I envied this chucked-out-gentleman, envied him so much that I even went into the tavern, into the billiards room: ‘Perhaps I, Too, will have a fight,’ I thought, ‘and get chucked out the window myself” (Dostoevsky, 1993, p. 49). All the Underground Man wanted was to be noticed. The officer did not notice the Underground Man standing next to the billiards table as he

Fyodor Dostoyevsky paints Underground man as someone who is tortured in his novel Notes From Underground. Despite everything that Underground man says he is lost and has no sense of his identity. When the character of Liza is introduced the reader gains some hope that the Underground man can find love. Although Underground man ultimately pushes Liza away, he really loved her through his own idea of love. Underground man shows this love for her through his first conversation with Liza, his trying to save Liza, and, ironically, through his cruelty towards Liza.

Notes from the Underground is a novel written by Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky. In this book, Dostoyevsky illustrated his ideals through the words of his literary protagonist, the Underground Man. The Underground Man strikes the readers as a person

Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel, Notes from the Underground Man, uses the idea of a modern dystopia by depicting a story that revolves around a distressed older man. Throughout the novel, the main character has a narcissistic belief that he is better than everyone else because of his acute sense of consciousness. His awareness however, also causes him to believe not only are people ignorant to the world around him but that they are also against him. In contrast, critics believe that the main character, the underground man, actually suffers from psychological disorders that causes him to reason this way. Psychological disorders are defined as a wide range of conditions that can affect mood, behavior and thinking, and based on his conduct in the novel, the underground man presents himself as an individual who is subjected to obsessive compulsive behavior, social repression and paranoia.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground (1864/2008) comes across as a diary penned by a self-described “spiteful” and “unattractive” anonymous narrator (p. 7). The narrator’s own self-loathing characterized by self-alienation is so obvious, that he is often referred to by critics as the Underground Man (Frank 1961, p. 1). Yet this Underground Man is the central character of Dostoyevsky’s novel and represents a subversion of the typical courageous hero. In this regard, the Underground man is an anti-hero, since as a protagonist he not only challenges the typical literary version of a hero, but also challenges conventional thinking (Brombert 1999, p. 1).

In this paper, I plan to explain Dostoevsky’s criticism of Western Individualism. Dostoevsky’s first criticism resides in the idea to “love life more than the meaning of it, “which is presented by the character Alyosha (Dostoevsky 3). Allowing this character to discuss this topic, along with the commentary of Ivan, demonstrates their mindset to solely focus on their own lives, opposed to caring for others. This leads to them living for the now, and not focusing on how their decisions will affect their future or others. Dostoevsky disapproves of this notion because living by this mentality encourages the guidance of logic, which is dangerous because it could tell you to kill yourself. From Dostoevsky’s Eastern Orthodox background, he believes that the only way from living from this situation is to deny it. By denying this way of living, the focus toward life will not be directed toward yourself, but toward the way you can impact the environment around you. Ivan clearly does not believe in these values, due to his intentions to commit suicide at the age of thirty. As said before, living by the idea to “love life more than the meaning of it” leads to death, and Ivan indulges in this to the fullest (Dostoevsky 3).

“Nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than freedom.” –The Grand Inquisitor” “Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.” - Father Zosima. These two quotes voice the polarized philosophies that impregnate the book, The Brothers Karamazov. Ivan, the second of the three sons, and Zosima, the old monk, are huge commentators on the question, “Is the burden of free will to much for a human to bear?”