Ivy G.’s Reviews > Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead > Status Update

I’m surprised that amidst his extreme vanity in spiraling to get the upperhand on his former colleagues, he has quite a healthy outlook on love, marriage and parenthood that the supposedly normal people like his colleagues likely don’t have. It’s an interesting difference in perspective.

I’m beginning to understand that the protagonist is very self-aware of his own misery and how it affects others. But he isn’t aware how he sounds like calling himself the more superior being than the rest for it. From their perspective, they are not friendly with him like that to want to invite him over to dinner, he did it himself, despite hating all of them out of spite. He’s quite a villain.

He talked about his intense vanity and how he thought himself to be so hideous compared to everyone else because of his high standards that he overthought a whole encounter with an officer and even how he presented himself. It’s interesting, to say the least.

I do like the random fourth wall breaks where the author acknowledges he is living underground and the reason for why he’s writing these notes is our of respect for the written word and how freeing it can be. But also, the honesty of the fact that no one could be sincere with their autobiographies. Man would always lie and keep certain things from friends, from himself and deny certain truths.

This is a vent I don’t agree with. Because he may be right to say that some people may like the chase of achieving their goals more than the goal itself, life is based on experience after all. But he makes it seem like humans can’t find another goal once they achieved one. He acknowledges there can be multiple but doesn’t say that humans will never run out of the chase as long as they come up with new goals.

So, it’s basically just a rant on how a man will always be stubborn and rebel just to prove they have free will. They are going to exercise it in the most random and even dumber ways just to prove their individualities. This is something I can agree on at the very least. Man can’t be trained to be a calculated being to serve theit desires and reasons.

I find myself agreeing to some of his whims. He sounds insane almost the entire time but he has his moments of clarity that still applies today. It’s interesting how modern he views that men are still violent and bloodthirsty today, that there’s still war and genocide now the same way there was before. That man often doesn’t always act on their interests, sometimes on a whim, they could do the opposite.

This is just the typical Dostoyevsky venting session he accumulates sporadically in writing. He really puts you in a character who is completely lost and desperate and deprived and insane. It’s interesting to read about a man who thinks he’s incapable of changing for the better, that he accepts the desperation and deprivation with pleasure because they’re intelligent men.