Final Post (Alexia Barrios)

            To answer the question on whether or not this book was worth reading I have only one response; yes. Though in the beginning I did not feel this way towards the book as I struggled to fully comprehend and grasp what Dostoyevsky was trying to discuss, I now find the whole experience to have been very worthwhile. Initially I hit some bumps on the road while attempting to dissect line after line in an attempt to discover what the point of this whole story was, but this struggle was necessary and I believe helped develop my analytical skills. The aspect that I found most compelling about Dostoyevsky and his writing in Notes from the Underground were his complex and thought provoking ideas. This to me was what made the reading the discussing the book worthwhile.  To be entirely honest, without the discussions I would have missed out on many of the topics that Dostoevsky mentioned simply due to the manner in which he presented them, which would have been a loss considering I was enlightened by some of the ideas he mentioned. I use the term enlightened here simply because the book has had some effect on my outlook because it has provided me with greater knowledge and understanding about certain subjects, such as the infinite universe, the walls, and society and science as a whole. One of the many that I found compelling was the concept that man does not do what is in our own best interest. Animals, according to Darwinian theory, are programmed to do what is only in their own self-interest and we may assume that we are considered under that same theory so it is appalling to see that we don’t. We are not entirely selfish creatures since we do sometimes go out of our way to take the “road less traveled on” so to say or the one that presents a end result that does not serve entirely in our favor. And an aspect of this that I find most compelling is that we go against our own self interest and do what may be the opposite of what is best for us just so we can justify that we are individual beings and our free will, an advantage Dostoyevsky seems to believe is the “most advantageous advantage”. This concept of free will and our ability to make our own conscious decisions on what to make of our lives is a concept that evolutionary theory fails to explain to us. To conclude, I am entirely shocked at how much I enjoyed Notes from the Underground because I was not expecting to enjoy it or the discussions we had on the topic as much as I did.