This month we will be reading:
Notes From Underground
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
WARNING!!!
While this book is short (83 pages), it is not an easy read(especially part 1) and will make you ponder a lot, so I advise to read slowly to underestand and enjoy.
More than anything, this book should make you think. And not about trivial stuff either, but about big, important conditions of life and how best to view and react to them.
If you don't give yourself time to think -- if just skim through the book quickly - then you won't get anything out of it.(https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49455.Notes_from_Underground)
Existentialism within Notes from Underground
Notes From Underground is more relevant in 21th century when human beings are dangerously and completely trapped by market and media. On the other hand, the problems of unemployment, sharp economic inequalities, intolerance and fundamentalism are rising day by day. Life today has become alarmingly insecure. Large scale manufacturing of nuclear weapons and greed of power hungry politicians have touched new heights in present scenario. The world has broken up in fragments and a common person has become a rootless, lonely and alien to society.
The novel encompasses the life and thoughts of a lonely, spiteful, sickly man ranting into a journal. Dostoevsky’s “underground man” is often grotesque, generally cruel, and completely isolated from other human beings. The rants of the anonymous “underground man” are brutally honest and intensely independent. Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground skillfully illustrates a fundamental paradox faced by all humanity. The novel is a tremendous achievement in existentialist thought because it illustrates the existence of a single individual man who in the midst of his infinite failures struggles to exist, to define himself, to define the universe around him and to belong.
The narrator of Notes from Underground is the “underground man;” the entire novel is comprised of his diary entries. The “underground man” explains that the purpose of his writing is self-inspection and the desire to better conceptualize his thoughts. He is struggling to understand his life, to make sense of his existence, and to comprehend the true nature of his being. Jean-Paul Sartre, a pioneer of existentialism, wrote in his work “Existentialism and Human Emotions” that “man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world and defines himself afterwards” The “underground man” is doing just that, he’s struggling to define himself after encountering his existence in the world. His journal entries illustrate his depression, his disparity, and his loss. He is all alone, and his only hope to truly see himself, to truly understand his own presence in the universe is through introspection. The “underground man” is struggling to develop an understanding of the nature of his being, and the nature of the universe around him. He is a cardinal symbol of existentialist philosophy.
The “underground man” struggles to exist and belong in a world in which he clearly does not. He attempts to define himself in some way and comes to the conclusion that he cannot, that he was never considered a concrete thing by himself or anyone around him: “I did not know how to become anything; neither spiteful nor kind, neither a rascal nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect”
The author of the diary struggles because he is unable to define himself, or posit himself into the known universe. He insinuates that he has given up trying to do so and says he comforts himself with “the consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only a fool who becomes anything”
He writes that nature controls the being, and the being has no true individuality or freedom. He moves, inertia pushes him, yet he is only a slave to the world in which he resides. The “underground man” insists that he longs for the ability to give up and give over to the will of the unknown. He praises inaction, and wishes he could have been a lazy sluggard, and had considered this his vocation. The “underground man’s” succumbing to nature is fundamentally anti-existentialist. The narrator becomes overpowered by his very own intense individualism and philosophically collapses. Sartre wrote in “Existentialism and Human Emotions” that “man is nothing else but what he makes of himself, such is the first principle of existentialism...man will be what he will have planned to be” . The “underground man’s” sudden infatuation with inertia and his surrender to nature is a fundamental betrayal of existentialism. Precisely for this reason is his return to the notion of free will and ultimate personal responsibility so triumphant.
About Meeting
Unlike some previous events, you will need to read the book in order to participate in this event.
Kindle: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Notes-Underground-Unabridged-Garnett-Translation-ebook/dp/B00G6E1ALM/
(Garnett Translation)
Notes
https://international.ucla.edu/media/files/Rapoport.pdf
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342746263_The_Perspectives_of_Existentialism_and_Dostoevsky's_Notes_From_Underground
