Things Fall Apart in the Notes From Underground

There has never been a more distressed, troubled anti-hero in all of literature, than the underground man in Notes From Underground. However, it wouldn't be fair to place blame on Fyodor Dostoyevsky as the first line of the novel is "I am a sick man..  I am a spiteful man.  I am a most unpleasant man" (3). The reader is made well aware that the underground man is mentally unstable from the get-go, but awareness does nothing to damper the impact the demented ideas, thoughts, and actions have. Is the goal of the author to produce a work so utterly twisted that the reader is left speechless and clambering for something to say? Where is the literary value? Why would a happy person choose to punish themselves by reading this? These are harsh criticisms, but the underground man would likely agree. The underground man is to his novel as Dwight Schrute is to the Office. Then again, the underground man would agree with anything that inflicts suffering on himself. He compulsively makes himself suffer, and if possible, tyrannizes others to make them suffer as well. He is remarkably adept at both. Ninety nine percent of the time, we read for one of two reasons. We will read to entertain ourselves or read to learn. Notes From Underground manages to accomplish virtually nothing of either, in fact, it has produced the inverse affect. At best, it has infuriated us, at worse, it has pushed a step backwards in intelligence. The author's outrageously extreme, ludicrous way of including legions of completely and utterly extraneous and unnecessary bizarre terms and words has, at best, impeded on our abilities as writers to produce clear, concise language. Furthermore, the underground man's moral compass has been so long broken that he has lost the ability to communicate with other people on a real level. It is as if the lines between literature and reality have been blurred, irreparably so.  After reading, perusing, skimming, researching, and exploring thousands and thousands of pages of writing, it can be said on good authority that the Notes From Underground and its anti-hero protagonist is one of, if not the, most profoundly infuriating novels ever written... Maybe that is what makes it so exceptional. After all,"...the most intense pleasures occur in despair..."