A review by emilymknight
Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

challenging emotional reflective slow-paced

4.5

Though this man is an emotional wreck at times, he is also has such great emotional depth - he is straight to the point and often rude, but he is also so self-aware and analytical of himself? It's like two sides of his brain are warring one another. Strange but interesting! And quite depressing.

It's almost like the man from White Nights who craves love and life, but enjoys the thought more than the actually doing, meets the overly self-aware and spiral-prone man of Hesse's Steppenwolf.

I think, like White Nights, this protagonist is someone who you will definitely think about a lot.

"But man is a frivolous and incongruous creature, and perhaps, like a chess player, loves the process of the game, not the end of it. And who knows (there is no saying with certainty perhaps the only goal on earth to which mankind is striving lies in the incessant process of attaining, in other words, in life itself, and not in the thing to be attained."

"Even sometimes there is happiness in the midst of sorrow; and indeed sorrow is everywhere."

"we are all divorced from life, we are all cripples, every one of us, more or less. We are so divorced from it that we feel at once a sort of loathing for real life, and so cannot bear to be reminded of it. Why, we have come almost to looking upon real life as an effort, almost as hard work, and we are all privately agreed that it is better in books."