R’s Reviews > Notes from Underground > Status Update

"It's a burden for us even to be men - men with real, our own bodies and blood; we're ashamed of it, we consider it a disgrace, and keep trying to be some unprecedented omni-men. We're stillborn, and have long ceased to be born of living fathers, and we like this more and more. We're acquiring a taste for it. Soon we'll contrive to be born somehow from an idea."

"But now, all of a sudden, there appeared before me the absurd, loathsomely spiderish notion of debauchery, which, without love, crudely and shamelessly begins straight off with that which is the crown of true love."

"But why should I die?"

Strange incest-y discussion about a father's jealousy over having to marry her daughter off. Freud would have a field day. Another dark undercurrent of the human psyche here...

Oh no, what an eventful dinner! I love how our narrator is so relatable yet at the same time so repugnant in many ways. It's as though we're being forced to converse with our ugly side. And that's probably why this is so gripping to read.

"I was already then bearing the underground in my soul."

Excellent passage where he debates the existential weight of moving out the way for an oncoming man, or standing resolute and 'bumping' into him. Really nice way of framing the deeper subject at hand here - individualism vs societal expectations.

OG 4channer who resists society, yet is so desperate to be SEEN by it. Incredible double bind. Freud dramatized.

"..But reason is only reason and satisfies only man's reasoning capacity, while wanting is a manifestation of the whole of life." This is beautifully explained by way of military uniforms throughout history: colourful and splendid, and yet "they fight and fight, they fight now, and fought before, and fought afterwards."

Thus, a fundamental drive towards chaos is what makes us human, contrary to 'utopian science'.

"I would like now to tell you, gentlemen, whether you do or do not wish to hear it, why I never managed to become even an insect."

- 'Headier' than I expected it to be. Precursor to Beckett's 'Trilogy' in some respects? Man's 'nature' is being cynically torn apart chapter by chapter. Revelations thus far? . . .

"Man is so partial to systems ... that he is ready to distort the truth ... so as to justify his logic."