I just finished reading this and I loved it.
I feel like I should be embarrassed by how much I related to it, but for reasons best described in the book, I don't.
What do you guys think of it?
>>7677189
I actually liked the guy. Alpha/Beta hybrid person is interesting.
I thought it was super feelsy and powerfully instructive.
The underground man wants to live a moral and deliberate life, but attempts to dictate the terms of it on his own. He can see beauty (in the classical, moralistic+aesthetic sense) but is unable to see his own soul as beautiful. Each time he refuses to act on his sense of beauty he lashes out at himself, and his mind has become haunted and marred by the idea that he is small and despicable. He refuses love and redemption on the grounds that he doesn't deserve it, because only faith lets one gain (unearned) redemption despite having guilt.
It occurred to me as an overwhelmingly religious work. After years of "hiding" underground, a person who wishes to be good but has not been living a good life will have no way of exiting the repetitive oscillations between hope and self-hatred outside of faith.
>>7677189
This book is what got me back into reading, as well as inspired me to write my own shit, desu. Dostoevsky really captures how humans are unreasonable simply for the sake of being unreasonable really well.
