First Reaction

        I’m not sure what I expected the book to be like, but Notes from the Underground is definitely a read unlike any other.  At first, I was extremely confused by the narrator’s character; he started off with “I am a sick man” and consequently jumped back and forth between his opinions about his illness and the spite he has for doctors. Several pages in, though, I’m starting to understand his behavior. Each chapter is basically a simple, short reflection that effectively communicates about why he is so miserable; I was particularly intrigued by his usage of consciousness to explain his inability to carry out things such as justice or revenge. I also found the Author’s Note at the beginning of the book to be quite interesting; Dostoyevsky is writing with the ‘spiteful’ persona in an attempt to demonstrate how such people are actively nurtured by the society. Instead of just describing the reflections himself, he is using a separate narrator to communicate his ideas through a completely different lens.