Notes From The Underground Book Review

Nonetheless he continues to wonder if it is in man s best interest to act for his own profit.

Notes from the underground book review. His expectations of others are very demanding and often very strange while his expectations of himself are deluded less than stringent. In notes from underground mr. He can only be nothing. He is a liar a hypocrite and an outright scoundrel.

Scruton opens a door for us into the past of a faraway country of which we have never known very much where everything reliable and good had been twice destroyed. The underground man suddenly implies that everything he has said in the last few chapters has all been a bitter joke. 4 15 rating details 81 593 ratings 5 227 reviews dostoevsky s most revolutionary novel notes from underground marks the dividing line between nineteenth and twentieth century fiction and between the visions of self each century embodied. The novel was first published in russia in 1864 and this excellent canongate canons edition has an enlightening and entertaining introduction by dbc pierre assessing the scale of this little book.

Underneath the structure and within the loathsomeness of darkness rats snakes spiders and evil spirits. Addressing the reader directly the underground man a rude and spiteful government official of about 40 has quit his job and ruminates in his poor apartment remembering past foolishness and humiliations and going out only to embarrass friends and abuse a prostitute. It also contains dostoyevsky s infamously morbid black humour which has you smiling at the most desolate of images. Notes from underground.

The main character in the book the underground man is a thoroughly unlikeable one right from the start. The narrator introduces himself as a man who lives underground and refers to himself as a spiteful person whose every act is dictated by his spitefulness. Then he suddenly admits that he is not really spiteful because he finds it is impossible to be anything he can t be spiteful or heroic. This was the more enjoyable work in this collection.