In his interview on the ‘First Draft’ podcast, George Saunders mentions how new writers tend to believe that they are to leave their flaws outside of their stories, and what should appear on the page should purely good, almost godlike. But, he elaborates, when we begin writing, we are, if being honest, compelled to not only write about our flaws but to reckon with them as well. Writing, Saunders says, helps us see and accept whatever that’s wrong with us, by putting in the context of story and understanding it as a result. Stories help us balance our flawed sides with that which is good in us, that which is forgivable.
Reading Dostoyevsky’s rampant first-person narrator in this novella, I was but reminded of Saunders, and I was, throughout the book, involved in thinking that Dostoyevsky is somehow coming in terms with his own demons through this underground man. But the book, time and again, proved more challenging than what I set out to analyze it as.
Divided into two parts, this a part essay, part memoir of a narrator who has supposedly lived underground for forty years. In part one, we read him go on about many topics, without any care for coherency, meaning, or sense. He is now condemning himself, and now turning that self-hatred into a philosophy that he lives by. The first chapter, a reader can digest, that is forgive the narrator for his self-indulgent dialogues, with an almost hysterical tone to it. But when he continues blabbering on and on, it becomes really difficult for any reader to understand, sympathize, or even care what he is saying. Not only is there contradiction in what he says, but there’s also a lack of track about his thinking: he jumps left and right, up and down, and then narrows in on a point and keeps talking about until he as exhausted not only himself but also that he was talking about.
Moreover, he is so self-absorbed, and writing with such belittling sense-of-self that he keeps on assuming what our reactions would be, toward his otherwise manic monologues, without ever thinking if the readers are actually having any similar reactions. ‘Ha ha ha’ he writes, ‘I know that you’ll all be laughing at me’, while there I was lost and confused about what I’ve read and now being accused of laughing at him, where I’ve clearly failed to even understand him at all.
Eventually however, having determined that I was finishing this novella, I started my efforts into ‘taming this novella’, to looking past the noise that the narrator is trying to create, and to reach what he is saying without the courage of being heard. And it worked. His speeches, although still filled with self-hatred, contradictions, and assumptions, started to make sense, once I knew to read between the lines. And therein, I found some very noble, vulnerable, and defiantly individualistic truths about life, and those who life in the ‘disgrace’ of it. I was reminded of J.M. Coetzee’s novel ‘Disgrace’, for it is but a memoir of disgrace, from a narrator who has had too much of, and is no more in a state to talk with any sort of dignity whatsoever.
It is towards the very end of part one what we begin to feel him simmer and prepare himself to tell a story; enough of his self-degrading sermons. Part two follows some events from his life when he was twenty-four, mainly his ambitions to come in contact with ‘real life’: first through pushing himself into an imaginary fight with a police-officer, then by confronting and disgracing his school-friends, and later by moralizing and sensitizing a prostitute by his literary speeches, feeling an intoxicating sense of power as a result. Yet, he remains tormented. And understandably so, since he knows no other way to be.
There’s
a lot to be liked, and even admired, about this novella, but much of it as to
be salvaged from the punishing monologues and distracting confessions of our
dejected narrator. It is that he says something so very important and precise
to say, but he cannot bring himself to say it plainly – he’s being honest
through dishonesty.
Ratings: 3/5 *** September 17,
2022_