Two tormented souls
Notes from Underground and The Double is a book that brings together two works that, among other things, focus really on the uncertain nature of the human mind. Behind the external veneer of stability and decisiveness which man manages to portray in his daily life, sometimes truthfully, there is a whole universe of conflicting thoughts, indecisions, doubts and paranoia that lurk beneath. The fact that, fortunately, most of us haven’t seen that side of ourselves, or at least not so very often, doesn’t reduce its inborn potential of wreaking havoc with our lives.
Notes from Underground
I have always been intrigued by soliloquys. The very idea that, given a chance, a person could get down to expressing the most intimate details of his life, of his emotions, of his moral transgressions, of his agony and of his anguish, and maybe find that little bit of solace at having externalised himself to the silence, gives a sort of cathartic element to them.
Man is a social creature and any society will have its unique customs and traditions. Contrasted with this is the individuality of a person – his personal interpretation and experience of life. Naturally, the society can never come to know about all the aspects of any individual’s personality, because it is not possible to decode a person through mere selective observation. When left to his own devices, a person will invariably be someone different. Loneliness, thus, brings out the real inner personality of any human, not adulterated with the burdens of duty, morality and propriety.
The unnamed narrator of Notes from Underground portrays the pinnacle of human uncertainties. One moment he decides something and vows to carry it to its completion, and the very next moment he finds himself morbidly against that very idea. Quite miraculously, armed with the weapon of selective and biased argumentation, he is able to convince himself of completely contradictory views within the space of a few minutes.
It is clear he is dejected with his life and how it has panned out. At a few places he remembers certain events from his past that left a deep impact on him, and imagines how he should have acted, and how he would act if he were to face the situation again. This continuous jugglery of incidents with intentions, the actual with the imagined, gives a memoirical tone to the work.
The work essentially becomes an amplified version of the narrator’s extreme cynicism. His uncertainties in actions and thoughts, his indecision regarding what he is going to do, all paint a tragic picture of his predicament. It reminds us how in our quest to understand the outside world and other people, their actions and motivations, often spending way more energy than needed, we often forget to understand our very own selves!
As we advance in social and technological evolution, having lesser and lesser time for interacting with our near and dear ones, much less with ourselves, such extremes of uncertainties may be attributed to the lack of a productive engagement of the mind, but I doubt it’s as simple as that. I think such uncertainties are there in every human, only their tendency to get magnified is dependent on a number of environmental and behavioural factors, one of which must surely be social isolation.
The Double
Mr. Golyadkin, a Titular Counsellor, is walking along the Neva river in St Petersburg one dark night when he comes across a person remarkably like him. Lost in his thoughts, he only observes him passively, but this event soon changes his life for ever.
The Double is a touching tale about a person who is losing his individuality. He is insecure, agitated and always in an excited state. It induces a sense of pity in the reader to see the extent to which he is willing to forego his self-respect, merely to put his words and thoughts across. Self-respect and ego, it seems, are luxuries to be foregone when a person is fighting for his very existence.
As his ‘double’ starts interacting with his co-workers and employers, Mr. Golyadkin almost goes into an existential crisis regarding how to behave with him. What follows are his efforts to make sense of his surroundings, of the people around him, of his own relationship and standing vis-à-vis them and the said double.
Both the works involve a high degree of penetration into a given individual’s thoughts. As such, there are frequent ramblings throughout the book, and on a couple of occasions, especially in The Double, I found myself wondering about the relevance of the same. But again, what would be the point of reading a book if one could know the relevance of each part as and when it happens?
All in all, Notes from Underground and The Double presents a gradual unfolding of the layers of the human mind. Both the works have a deep message to convey – the human mind is fickle, our decisions often aren’t based on as solid reasons as we would like to believe, and, perhaps most importantly, how a person behaves is dependent on how he experiences the world – if one is unable to understand someone, it could often be because one hasn’t really tried to understand him.
If we could have a chance to look inside that person’s thoughts, chances are our condescension and judgemental tendencies would melt away.