Notes from the Underground - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

"I look inside myself and see my heart is black
I see my red door, I must have it painted black
Maybe then I'll fade away and not have to face the facts
It's not easy facing up when your whole world is black"
                                    ( Paint it Black - Rolling Stones )

    This is possibly Dostoevsky's least organized, chaotic work, with doses of philosophy brimming over; it is in two parts and the first is a monologue, which reminded me of the Camus' masterpiece "The Fall" - and, it is considered one of the first existential novels ever written; so the style of the monologue - wordy, trying to justify one's outlook, one's doubts, what one wants a possible reader to seem like convictions. The book is in two parts - the monologue which run about 30% of the way - and then the second part, which is his recalling of certain life's early incidents - when he was a young man of twenty four ( He is forty at the time of the monologue). A few quotes from the monologue suffices to show the doubt our unnamed "Underground Man" is up against:

"Oh, gentlemen, do you know, perhaps I consider myself an intelligent man, only because all my life I have been able neither to begin nor to finish anything. Granted I am a babbler, a harmless vexatious babbler, like all of us. But what is to be done if the direct and sole vocation of every intelligent man is babble, that is, the intentional pouring of water through a sieve?"

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Notes from the Underground (pp. 20-23). Kindle Edition.

" And how do these wiseacres know that man wants a normal, a virtuous choice? What has made them conceive that man must want a rationally advantageous choice? What man wants is simply INDEPENDENT choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice.

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Notes from the Underground (pp. 30-31). Kindle Edition. "

"you tell me again that an enlightened and developed man, such, in short, as the future man will be, cannot consciously desire anything disadvantageous to himself, that that can be proved mathematically. I thoroughly agree, it can--by mathematics. But I repeat for the hundredth time, there is one case, one only, when man may consciously, purposely, desire what is injurious to himself, what is stupid, very stupid--simply in order to have the right to desire for himself even what is very stupid and not to be bound by an obligation to desire only what is sensible."

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Notes from the Underground (p. 32). Kindle Edition.

Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind. The more decent he is, the greater the number of such things in his mind.

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Notes from the Underground (p. 44). Kindle Edition.

As can be seen, the monologue travels through the narrator's doubts fueled by Nihilism, Existentialism and Egoism. Then we move to the second, larger part of the novel which has some plot - and shows our "Underground Man" for his true worth - how bogged down by egoism he has been in his youth, that he cannot deal in any relationship. That this egoism will ruin others too, who come to embrace, to help him out. The tale of Liza the twenty year old prostitute - who Dostoevsky shows us as in possession of virginal innocence, not with standing her current state in life. We then see that the narrator's stand at forty is fueled by his ideologies, but the primary reason for him to distance himself and make himself "a pedestal" , albeit below the functioning every day life - far from association of others is the egoism that he's been hampered with.

A relatively shorter work - a novella - is both a dark piece of writing, yet rewarding in its presentation of ideologies - and the fall to the underground. Another book that reminded me of is Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf. There too, we are shown that the man who elevates himself over other in ideologies, is possibly there due to early life events, of his own short coming, although smirking in self satisfaction in his own cocoon of making, in later life.