/lit/ - Literature

how do i stop being him?

How the fuck can somebody be 'poor' yet employ a house servant?

What the fuck was the point of this book? 'Edgelords are super cringe'?

Why is Underground Man considered so relatable? I've seen dozens of threads on this book lately, so I may as well add my five cents.

There was nothing in Notes from Underground that felt substantially relatable to me. The man is pitiful human that chooses to spread misery to get a rise out of it, is completely insincere about everything he says, knowingly living to a self-destructive code.

Bear with my buzzwords, but what does it say about the psyche of the average person when I see so many reddit bugmen saying he's a relatable character? I've read comments and analysis trying to break him down into the view that his place in modern society is represented by a "4channer" or "incel", although the fundamental point of the book seems to be more a portrait of the mentality and morality of a person at the bottom of the bureaucratic chain but still very much part of corporate society, the type in favour of wherever pure rationalism leads in spite of his cognition that it's antithetical to human nature. Isn't this a mirror of the ilk who seethe about "badthing" like "antimask" while in pure despair of their own condition? Even the rules and culture of 4chan and reddit are an illustration of the differences between the two: 4chan is now a pseudo wild west. It's watered and dumbed down over the years, but it still contains a free spirit, in contrast to the unoriginal groupthink safezone full of midwits who will chastise you for wrongthink. This isn't to try and make a modern political point even if I'm providing an example, but isn't the irony lost on these people that the kind of mentality its critical of is of pathetic losers like them, a kind that is so prevalent today? And yet they're self-aware and relate to it without a moment of self-reflection? I'm also kind of retarded, so please bear with my shit analysis or if any nuance is lost - it's been a while since I've read it.

This is significantly more entertaining if you pretend that Terry A. Davis is narrating it

Books about social alienation? Starting with an obvious one.

So i started reading this and the narrator is talking nonsense, does it get better?

I've started reading this. It's a cry for help.

It just hit me that I'm literally the Underground Man

>takes 2 years to work up the courage to bump into someone that mildly inconvenienced him in the past and who doesn't even acknowledge his existence
based

If this were a modern novel, he would just be a gamer incel, right?

Any books about feeling isolated from or misanthropic towards your peers?

>inb4 picrel

Could lifting have saved him?

>>18666977

What was his problem?

So this just describes the average anon but in the 19th century?
>Lives in a world of his own
>Extremely bitter
>Makes up fantasy scenarios in his head that fluctuate between power fantasies and extremely pessimistic worst case scenarios
>Has an unwarranted sense of superiority over regular people

Is it his weakest novel? It feels like he's just expounding ideas and uses the narrator as his mouthpiece.

Link a song that you associate strongly with a specific book as a recommendation for that book. The more the song captures the feel of the book, the better. I'll start off with one of my favorites, where the song is actually based on the book as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kewkTjNfUfk
>Notes from the Underground, Dostoevsky

Uhhhh I don't get it.

>I dropped my eyes almost every time I met anyone. I even made experiments whether I could face so and so’s looking at me, and I was always the first to drop my eyes.This worried me to distraction. I had a sickly dread, too, of being ridiculous, and so had a slavish passion for the conventional in everything external.

Should Notes from Underground be considered one of the first works, which incorporate metafiction

>>18037093
Notes from Underground is Catcher in the Rye for adult men. Its good to read both in your lifetime