Subtitle

A CONFLUENCE OF DAYS, WEEKS AND YEARS

by Jonathan Vold

Wednesday, July 6

The Underground Man

Dostoevsky Final (Russian 141, 11/30/90, Prof. Rubchak)

The general aim of the Underground Man, if not simply to be aimless, was to try to break away from socially imposed rules and chains. Plot was just another restriction, like the system of twice two, it chained the author to something systematically straightforward. He would be locked on a limited course on which his story would depend too much on sequence and consequence, on multiplier and product.

The Underground Man wanted to defiantly break away from such straight thought patterns because they, like everything else he protested, stood as a threat to his freedom. In fact, in his grasp for freedom, he rebelled against all of the conventional parameters of a normally structured “novel.” Diction is squeezed between an explanatory page-one footnote and a parenthetical closing comment. Thought often becomes contradictory and is never really conclusive. Characters, beyond the anti-hero himself, do not appear for half the book. Conflict is primarily between the writer and the reader, even as the writer is continually unstable and the reader’s existence is denied outright. And the setting through part one is a constricting coffin of an apartment, a “funk-hole” of surreality.

And ultimately, the Underground Man had to reject plot, because it is the most formally limiting of literary structures. Whereas the other parameters are primarily passive and abstract, plot is necessarily active and concrete according to the laws of time and space. The Underground Man did not want to exist for such activity. “What do I care for the laws of nature and arithmetic?” he asked rhetorically. “As though such stone walls were really the same thing as peace of mind.”

In conclusion, there is no plot because that was not the purpose of there being a “story.” “An author writes something to please ‘everybody,’” considered the Underground Man. But ‘everybody’s’ pleasure is only another “golden dream,” and besides, he was simply “imagining an audience” anyway.

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