Class Discussion (2/5) (Meagan Adler)

After today’s class discussion on the novel, I was particularly intrigued by the concept of infinity and how the impossibility of perceiving something that is not finite is significantly daunting.  We depend and need the wall that Dostoyevsky connotes to in order to remain mentally sane; if we were to have no boundaries we would not be able to give meaning to anything in our lives and furthermore would have no direction or purpose in living.  Like the masses the narrator describes in the book, the wall has for us “something tranquillising, morally soothing, final” (pg.6); we function within structured limits and it is the idea that we have these limits that allows us to feel comfortable in the world we live.  Furthermore, this idea can be contextualized in the unhappy 19^th century in which the narrator lives, for Darwinism completely destroyed the masses’ wall and for a time left them limitless until they were able to create a new wall around this idea.  We need to have definitive limits in order to progress, if we live in a world without walls we find it impossible to find a purpose in living.