One might say a defining element of quality media is its ability to for it to make you step out, or reassess, your current frame of reference. So as we approach a time where the value of story, of narrative, is becoming more and more saturated into a technologically advanced culture, the potential enrichment from these stories seem less and less appealing. Especially now with the seemingly infinite readily available short-form media, it seems a lot less desirable to commit hours at a time, up to dozens of hours, to some as unexciting as a paperback novel.
And this makes sense to a large degree: why spend hours parsing through lessons and concepts found within books when one can consolidate said info in a fraction of that time through modern technology? It’s a good question, and renders modern reading as a questionable time-consuming activity.
But every once in a while, there will come a title that justifies everything. It will remind you why the power of descriptive language, the weaving of themes and symbols is so much deeper than that of all other media. The power of a book to project itself in the mind of a creative individual cannot be compared to that of a movie or show.
Reading is the playground of the imagination. And if you invest your conscious time and effort, you will be rewarded.
One of those books, written x years ago by a man named Fyodor Dostoevsky, is a book that manages to encapsulate this idea and carry it untouched through time.
From the outside it appears as all others, a series of pages marked by ink filled with subjective meaning. Books are simple, and we typically know how to approach them. Start to finish, painting a clearer picture of the narrative as we progress.
Notes from Undergound, while appearing as a story, cannot as easily be reduced to such. When analyzed in this way one will fail to understand the implications of his writing. Notes, put simply, is an observation. It is an observation of the human condition which requires one to think in a way which highlights the ideas themselves. Once these ideas are in place there is a sort of cannibalization that occurs within the mind, you’ve now been exposed to the necessary falseness of your own way of thinking, which can and must, by nature of its very observation, exist.
The narrative focuses on one man, namely the underground man, and his descriptive understanding of society. It follows his thoughts, queries, and eventually his actions in first person as he engages with the world. Now it is evident that this underground man is a despicable creature. The very first words of the books are… “I am a sick, spiteful, and unattractive man…” and the claim rings true in following pages. The life he lives, the schemes he creates, unquestionably appear obtuse to the outsider looking in. There is almost no justification for the egregious, pessimistic nature of this man.
But Despite all this… the underground man is undoubtedly intelligent, almost aggressively intellectual… possessing an odd charm that resonates with the correct reader. And as one continues to read, an unsettling idea will arise. Yes, the underground man is disgusting, irredeemable, and he admits as much… but he’s not necessarily wrong in his analysis.
In fact, his grasp on the psyche of others is frighteningly real. You hope for the opposite, you hope that predictably, the narrative rounds out as a score of useless ramblings from a useless old man. But instead, he poses his critique directly at you, the reader, and the people of action. And there really isn’t any way around the implications. You start to realize that actually, the underground man is the natural progression of extreme introspection and analysis. The only reason we don’t all become the underground man, as Dostoevsky implies, is due to impulses along the way that motivate our action. These are the impulses that drive mankind, that make us appear human, they cannot be rationally justified. As for one who takes this path to the end, they will themselves become underground. It is only by human impulse that we do not all devolve into perpetual observers of chaos.
The troubling nature of reading this book, is because after it exposes you to yourself so viciously, there is no resolve. There is an unraveling without a reconstruction. Upon realization one yearns for an antidote, but the book offers none. So for many, myself included, proper engagement with Dostoevsky can yield very real, very nihilistic consequences. But only on the other side can one understand that such an “unraveling” is only a necessary step towards a true, healthily engagement with existentialism.
“The deeper the grief, the closer to god”
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