I am sorry this post is finding you so late—but here it is:
Why does Dostoevsky end “Notes from Underground” with the following passage, “This is not the end, however, of the ‘Notes’ of this paradoxical writer. He could not help going on. But to us too it seems that this will be a good place to stop. 1864.” What theme does quote tie back to and how does it relate to the start of the book? What is this saying about the relationship between the reader and the writer, but perhaps more importantly the role of the writer?
Nice job today in class—I am extremely proud of all you have accomplished thus far, and you should all be proud of the work, time, and effort you have put into the class. Well done.
I will have the links to Hamilton College, UNC, and Harvard up first thing tomorrow morning.
Lastly, there is no homework for tonight—unless you need to post a blog entry, get caught up on the reading, or for those who are feeling bold starting the extra credit assignment. Again, one last reminder, if you do more than the required number of posts on a given week, you get extra points. Yeah for extra points. See you tomorrow.
4 comments:
These last lines really make the underground man even more relatable, as if he could be, or even is, any one of us. It ties things back even to the author's note when Dostoyevsky writes, " The author of these Notes, and the Notees themselve are both, of course imaginary. All the same, if we take into consideration the conditions that have shaped our society, people like the write not only may, but must exist in that society" (Sorry for the long quote). The underground man really is all of us. He has to be, he's talking about our society really. In my opinion, I think if you can't relate to one thing, if not everything, the narrator talks about, you're either completely ignorant or already completely blinded, completely tricked by society. That might be a bit harsh... I think you really must have fallen for society's trap of material happiness if you can't see yourself in the Underground comments.
Anyway, these last lines relate to the theme of Universal Suffering. The Underground Man is everyone, thus so must be his sufferings (lol). I mean, it was almost too easy to put myself in his shoes, almost too easily did i understand and identify with his reactions. I've felt some of those underground feelings, i think we all have really, admittedly not to the same extent as the narrator. But in my opinion anyone can get to that point. Many of us are underground to some extent. But the narrator has been buried alive for so long...i don't know. I'm pretty sure i'm getting carried away / making things up now haha.
So i guess that makes the role of the writer the scribe of society. maybe its his job to live underground and put the crap that is society into words. again maybe a bit too harsh... but nevertheless, its their job to be critical of society in hopes of changing it.
Wow, i didn't realize i was one of the last to post this week....oops
Since this was the last blog entry for Notes, I went a more "stream of consciousness" route. (I figure I sort of owe it to Dostoevsky.)
I’ve often heard it said about paintings and designs that art is never finished. You set down your paintbrush one night and wake up each morning to add more “finishing” touches. Dostoevsky made a bold move in introducing “stream of thought” or consciousness as a writing style, but he did not do away with fine-tuning all together. Instead of obsessing over the style and word choice of what he has already written, Dostoevsky’s work is never finished because his character just keeps writing more. Writing heals his “sick”ness. It allows him to “be carried away by [his] feelings”, to “hate or love, if only not to sit with [his] hands folded” (247). We don’t need to see the rest of what he has written because it won’t give us anything we haven’t already been given. We don’t need to see the rest because the story of the underground man is a universal character. We don’t need to have the following chapters spelled out for us because this is our story as well, and we can finish it ourselves.
I think a lot of us (myself included) balk at the suggestion that a man as obsessive and vengeful and miserable as this narrator could be anything like ourselves. However, we must remember that he is recording and offering to us every thought that crosses his mind. If we were to write down every thought that crossed our minds, without any omission or alteration, and then gave that mind-transcript to an English class to analyze, very few of us would stand up against much harsh scrutiny. In our own individual moments of obsession and vengeance and depression, the existence and nature of our own underground is revealed.
In many cases, hearing that the last chapter of a book or the sequel to a movie was being withheld would trigger, for me, a curious sort of anger. However, with Notes from Underground, I wasn’t bothered at all to learn that I was only being given a portion of what was a much longer memoir. This wasn’t because I didn’t like the book, because I actually really enjoyed it. I wasn’t bothered by the abrupt ending because the reader and the writer of this book are actually one in the same. Somehow, something mixed up with my instinct or my memory or my understanding of this world tells me that I already know how this story will unfold. The author and reader are so closely linked that the reactions to the text are significantly strengthened. In imagining that this is our own story, we experience the same shame and pride as the underground man as we flip through the pages of Dostoevsky’s universal novel and read about our own journey.
As a character in this role of universality, Dostoevsky is faced with a daunting challenge: he must write something that teaches every one of his readers about themselves. With this idea in mind, he couldn’t possibly have revealed any more of his story to his reader. As the writer of the book, Dostoevsky acts as his readers’ prompter. He gives just enough information to open the reader’s eyes and to start asking for answers to unpleasant questions, but he knows that he doesn’t have to power to do anything more. He describes the walls that surround us to make his reader aware of his cage, but there is no point in revealing to his audience any more of his story because he knows that he cannot tell us how to proceed. He knows that we have to discover, through our own series of setbacks and breakthroughs and obsessions and epiphanies, how to break down our own walls. Ultimately, we read this story to simply understand that we’re not alone in a universal effort.
Upon reaching the end of his notes, the narrator in the underground takes a new journey out of his hideaway once and for all. It gives him a chance, after recalling the mistakes that he had made in the past, to show the reader that all that he has written of, most importantly his fears of opening up to others, was not in vain. He remarks, towards the end, that "we are so unused to living that we often feel something like loathing for 'real life' and so cannot bear to be reminded of it" (122).
He recalls his real life experiences finally with emotion and satisfaction in his writing as well as a transferral of his own antagonists. He shows the reader that he can indeed feel emotion as he did for Liza; he felt a connection, an attractiveness, and a passion for her in their similar misfortunes of being owned. "...I was ashamed to look at her, a different feeling was kindled in my heart and flared up all at once...a feeling of mastery and ownership" (118). This is something that he vehemently denies in the beginning of his notes, almost as though he does not feel comfortable sharing such ludicrous ideas with the reader quite yet. He only portrays it as anger and false pride towards others, towards Zverkov, and towards other men of action. This is where the theme of thought versus action ties in. "Oh, gentlemen, perhaps the only reason I consider myself a clever man is that I have never in all my life been able to either begin or finish anything . . . but what can one do, if the only straightforward task of every intelligent man is pointless chattering, the deliberate pouring out of emptiness?" (28)
Yet, throughout his writing, he gradually opens up, by reliving those experiences and analyzing his cowardice and inability to overcome his fear of being judged. He opens up to the reader, and shares the feelings that are so overwhelmingly real to him. Personally, I didn't believe for a second towards the beginning when he claimed never to have felt any sort of love in his life. Good and bad distinguish each other, one cannot be without the other, and there was no time at all when he was pouring out "emptiness." Perhaps by finally subjecting himself to the openness and truth of his own emotions, he can apply them to reality (in stopping the notes and escaping from the underground), instead of living in the past and trying to manipulate them in his mind and in his thoughts.
In the last sentence of “Notes from Underground,” the narrator’s use of the word paradoxical (Yes, I totally had to dictionary.com that word) sums up much of the nature of this character. In this novel, we see a paradox with the many contradictions involving the narrator’s statements, and also the readers and the narrator. It’s been stated many times that the Underground Man is all of us, which itself seems like a paradox since it outwardly appears that he could never represent anyone in this world, but at the same time, he does in many ways.
The ending of this novel correlates to one of the themes we discussed in class, this being “What is human?” As we learn that “Notes from Underground” is a prime example of the duality of humans, the good vs. evil, pain vs. happiness examples we discussed, we can assert that the narrator is not only paradoxical, but everything human is as well. The contradiction of the human condition will always happen because for one thing to exist, its opposite needs to equally exist or we would never understand what that issue means in context (sorry if this makes no sense, I’m struggling to get the thought in to words that I understand in my mind).
Since Dostoevsky expresses that the journey of this Underground Man is not over, he is mirroring the real life situation that our paradoxical lives will never end; the contradictions that must exist in our lives cannot be stopped. There is no ending to the human condition and since the human condition is a big theme, there is no ending to the book either. Certain things will not end unless you put made up time limits on them, such as the 1864 used by the narrator. The year of 1864 is just another stage in the continued condition of the narrator. Implementing a meaningless number that correlates to a “time” just puts an arbitrary closing on this book, which is another contradiction. Ironically, the one thing that is supposed to add closure to this book is another arbitrary term, 1864, which is just time that is made up. This relates to the “2x2=5” issue, because really it doesn’t seem like there is a proper ending to anything in this world, just whatever we feel should naturally (the 2x2=4 way) be the ending.
The narrator begins ‘Notes’ by describing a condition he continues to suffer purely out of spite, and he ends with a statement that to me, seems to be out of spite. Of course the narrator could not help but go on with his story, and I don’t see how he could end it. He puts an ending that seemingly has no closure to it, just to spite us, well some of us, because I wasn’t bothered by the ending at all. This spite would seemingly be caused by the fact that the Underground Man just revealed everything to us, and he hates that kind of vulnerability. This hatred is found at the end of the book when he starts to feel that way towards Liza because she is witnessing him reveal his secrets, just like we are. The narrator said, “Do you understand how much I shall hate you for being here and hearing me tell you all this?” to Liza, but he could also be saying this to his readers.
I think it was fitting that the novel ended, or not-so-much ended the way it did because we learn that the Underground Man is continuing to write, and writing is the only way he can express himself at all, and if nothing else allows him to express, then he probably cannot stop the one thing giving him this pleasure. We can even believe that he will continue writing his story until his life ends, because this is the only way he can break down his wall. The narrator gives us unlimited possibilities to the ending. We can imagine the ending to involve something we suspect he would go through, or something we are going through. I think this ending allows a more personal relationship between reader and narrator; we are allowed to be connected, and that is often not the case in other books when we aren’t meant to be the characters.
The narrator rebels through his writing, because he writes about innermost thoughts that most of us would be scared to. He will continue writing and rebelling, but he leaves us to question at what point will this rebellion end, and if it ever will. The narrator has a self imposed role of showing his readers that he can rebel, so he is unlike us in this manner. At the same time, the narrator also shows us that we are so much like him, because we have experienced these doubts and thoughts that he has, which is yet another contradiction made by the “paradoxical writer.”
There isn’t an end to this “paradoxical writer,” and there shouldn’t be an end, because even after he isn’t alive, his story is always alive in all of us because he can make us be a part of him and the human condition. The narrator leads us to believe that he will continually retreat to this “underground”, his mind, but he will also retreat to our minds as well, making us part of his “underground” and adding another dimension to the reader/writer relationship. The narrator is retreating in our minds because, though he cannot directly communicate with humans, he can powerfully convey his suffering to us, and make us feel what he is feeling, thus making us an outlet for his expression and another embodiment of his “underground.”
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