Question

Compare and contrast the narrative style of Notes from the Underground and Pointed Roofs Richardson and Dostoyevsky.

Answer 1

The "underground" of the mind is the treacherous terrain into which Dostoevsky here delves deep, exposing its most buried fears and desires. The novel was first published in Russia in 1864

and this excellent Canongate Canons edition has an enlightening and entertaining introduction by DBC Pierre assessing "the scale of this little book" and elucidating how "Dostoevsky dropped a pill into the middle of the 19th century and the thing is still fizzing: existentialism".

What makes a book a classic? DBC Pierre explores how, in capturing the "curious machinations of the mind", Dostoevsky (an author "as sensitive as a synapse") is distinct from

Russian novelists hitherto more concerned with action: "He was a psychologist before psychology existed, and his observations were acute and universal". This novel still resonates,

too, because the themes addressed are "the seedlings of the themes of our day – industrialism, utopianism, western markets, the grip of science and technology on truth".

The "Underground Man" is a 40-year-old former civil servant, an unreliable narrator who – in spite of himself – is "intoxicated with spite". The novel's first section is an

embittered monologue narrated from his St Petersburg basement. The lower this alienated antihero sinks, the loftier his intellectual pontifications, critiquing contemporary philosophies on rationalism and free will.

"Man likes to create and lay down paths, that is indisputable. But why does he also love destruction and chaos so passionately?" he wonders. The second part of the book tells the engrossing story leading to his seclusion

. He is "burdened with one ancient memory" and hopes that in writing it down it will "let go" of him. As a 24-year-old, his life is "gloomy, untidy and solitary to a savage extent"

and he yearns to be on an "equal social footing". After a humiliating social occasion with old schoolfriends, he pursues them seeking revenge, meeting instead the 20-year-old prostitute Liza by whom he is both attracted and repelled. In his attempts at social – and moral – climbing, he digs himself into an ever deeper hole.

Dostoevsky chips away at complex human motivation with persuasive stylistic tools, succeeding in being hilarious and heart-rending in a single sentence (after all, "mankind is a comical construction"),

captured in this beautiful translation by Natasha Randall. It's through elegantly excavating the particularities of his era that Dostoevsky strikes upon timeless truths, and with perspicacious analysis of behaviour, tunnels through to hidden depths.