I finished Dostoyevsky’s phenomenal “Notes from Underground” recently, and it got me thinking. In the novella, the anonymous narrator describes his plan to get beat up by General Zverkov, get sent to prison and live on the street as a beggar when he is released, only to come across this general again and make him realize what he did to the narrator. General Zverkov is a person who the narrator knew from his time in grade school, and the narrator invited himself to his going away party, where he made a fool of himself. After the party, he comes up with the plan, which he does not follow through with.
The only problem with this plan, as the narrator says, is that it is ripped straight from a book and is not conducive to reality, which would act completely differently than how he imagined it. And that sentiment has me reflecting on what I gain from stories and literature.
Something that people who read can deal with, especially if they read fiction, is the idealization of their actions within their own minds and the complete and utter disregard for how their actions actually are. Later in the novella, the narrator is talking to a prostitute and she says that he sounds ‘bookish’ in her opinion. He sounds like he is just repeating things that he heard in a book and not actually speaking his mind.
That sentiment also added on to my thinking and it made me realize that people who read must look beyond the page into reality to truly understand other people. In the book “Slaughterhouse Five,” the Science Fiction writer in the book said something along the lines of, “back in the day, you only needed to read ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ to understand everything, but now, things are different, things are more complicated.”
So, to sum it up, my opinion is this: read literature, read a lot of it, but don’t rely on literature to learn how people “should” act in real life, as literature can never really capture the complexity of human thought, it can only serve as an imitation.
