A review by lee_foust
Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

5.0

Of course this short novel of a "contrarian," as the text itself calls him, is one of my all-time favorite novels and I feel compelled to reread it every so often for comfort in the knowledge that I'm not the only perverse human who does and thinks unreasonable things. Indeed I think we all think and do unreasonable things pretty consistently. It's just that having invented reason, we shoe-horn every impulse-based and guilt-inducing action or thought into some post-facto logical equation, reversing the terms, like an algebra equation, to justify ourselves as rational beings--or at least thinking beings who don't just blunder through life with contradictory urges and an entirely confused notion of who we are and what we want. Guess what? We're mostly totally irrational, impulsive, and desperate creatures who don't just blunder through life with contradictory urges and an entirely confused notion of who we are and what we want. Consequently, I alternately laugh at and weep for the Underground Man every damned time. Never have comedy and tragedy been so closely wed.