Part 6: The End (Alexia Barrios)

I had a love hate relationship with Notes from the Underground and it's narrator. The first part of the novel I found to be extremely dense and a challenge to read and interpret, but at the same time I enjoyed the philosophies that this narrator was proposing. I enjoyed the second part much more because it had more of a storyline, where the first was just a collection of his conscious ramblings. With the narrator specifically, his indecisiveness drove me insane, as I was unable to tell between what was fact and what was fiction.

Overall, I found the ending to be very interesting. Though the narrator before was disgusted with sentimentality, in the end I began to notice that he was developing sentiments toward Liza. I am not sure if those sentiments came from his inner need for dominance, and she was easily somebody who he could dominate based on her social status and occupation as a prostitute, but there were definitely something there or he would not have been awaiting anxiously for her arrival or concern over her opinion of his home. I also really enjoyed Liza’s character and I found her presence in the novel to brighten up the novel, which in my perspective had been very dark and philosophical thus far. The narrator was able to change her with his speech into an affectionate character who listened to everything he said without responding in any negative fashion. Instead she embraced him for who he was, something that no one else had done throughout the novel and this is why I believe he had a breakdown in the end because he finally received the love and social connection he had been deprived from basically his entire life.