Notes From Underground | Freedom and Reason in Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground
Deborah Moreland received her doctorate in literary studies at the University of Texas at Dallas, having written her dissertation on the connection between high culture and low culture in early twentieth-century British literature. She now teaches and chairs the English department at a private school in Dallas. In the following essay on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground, she considers the novella’s relationship to Enlightenment, Romantic, and contemporary epistemologies.
“I want to test whether it’s possible to be entirely frank at least with oneself and dare to face the whole truth.”
Anyone who has attempted psychotherapy after a traumatic event in his or her life has probably had a thought similar to this comment Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Underground Man makes to himself at the end of his opening Notes and immediately before he begins his ruminations about incidents in his past that might have led to his present despair, self-loathing, and complete alienation from society. Preceding, by fifty-some years, Freud’s...
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