NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND

Notes on Notes from Underground Introduction In the context of works we read in Liberal Studies, Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground strikes a new and very dissonant chord, although (as I shall mention later) the sound is one we should recognize clearly enough, if we are at all familiar with some of the more important "heroic" figures from twentieth-century literature. For in this work Dostoevsky is holding up for our inspection and appreciation (if that is …

…a conversation with friends. To these encounters he brings such a strongly perverted ego, combined with a humiliating sense of how others see him, that his attempts to make contact defeat themselves. For he is filled with a naïve Romantic sense of his own value, his superiority over others, and yet he cannot tolerate the thought that they might think ill of him. In other words, his Romantic assertiveness, largely derived from sentimental fictions,