Like the Pope, he is cast off in isolation, but willingly so. Like the Pope he has lost his occupation -- but again, willingly so as he has been able to retire from his former civil service job. He has chosen to live underground, that is, away from other people. Over the course of the novel, he self-fashions himself as a superior person. He sees himself as well-read, cultivated, and above the minutia of everyday existence.
However, the reader likely sees him differently. Left with nothing to believe in, the Underground Man simply inflicts his purposelessness, bottled sense of rage against himself, forcing himself to suffer needless physical and psychological pain. He is physically constrained, like the Pope, but by his own will, and his decision to deny God has made him less mobile, less free, in contrast to what advocates of religious denial might suggest. The modern project of denying the supposed constraints of faith actually takes away all freedom of the human will, Dostoevsky suggests in his portrayal of the Underground Man.
Both short works begin, not in the middle of the action, but with a detailed character sketch. The tales only begin to shift to action in the middle, after fully explicating the significance of the main character. In the case of the Pope, the main character is passive, and events happen to him, given his constrained state under a totalitarian regime. Dostoevsky's protagonist writes in his own voice, as if speaking to the reader in the voice of an angry, rambling manifesto that seems to have little narrative purpose, other than to show different facets of the character, and different aspects of his embittered point-of-view. The most animated discussion occurs not during the Underground Man's discussion with an individual, but with himself, as he rages against the ability of human beings to have free will and to know their best interests. This...
The actions of these collective groups lead only to frustration, a lack of responsibility, ineptitude, and inefficiency. What sort of world does this lead to? The people who are most capable seem to be disappearing, while the least capable are left in charge. Dagny wants to know why the capable people are disappearing, and she has to find the answer to this question in order to understand what is happening
Movie Dystopia In Time (2011) is a dystopian satire set in the year 2161 in which the ability to increase the human lifespan by purchasing time has become the new currency and the entire basis of the capitalist economy. These life-years (living years) can be bought, sold or traded, although they are mostly available to the wealthy elites while the poor and the working class literally survive from one day
Many of the advances of science in the area of technology are at best quite fearsome for human beings until they become accustomed with these functions and applications. One can only imagine how strange the creation and development of all of this must have been ten, or twenty years ago and even more so in the earlier 1900's as all of this began to fall into place in the
Classroom: Teaching Utopias, Dystopias, and the American Dream This article published in Teaching American Literature: A Journal of Theory and Practice in 2011 examines the advantages and pitfalls of democracy in the classroom. The author, Rebeccah Bechtold, tells of her attempt to create a utopian classroom by enabling students to design and implement their own syllabus. The class was designed so students were included in deciding "a majority of the
The degree to which they are shown as incapable of doing so -- and to which French society is shown as being equally incapable of interacting with them -- illustrate the degree to which a certain cinematic panopticon has been placed around the subjects. From the omniscient perspective of the viewer, there is no apparent escape provided from this disposition. And in this immobility and the resultant anger that drives
Envy In a somewhat more imaginative work, Yury Olesha explores more extreme actions and motives for rebellion against the new regime. His 1927 novel Envy is at once a critique of the lack of individuality and emotion in Soviet Russia and a lamentation for the failures of the human spirit in the face of the large Communist machine. Again, it is expressly and simply difference that leads to the primary conflict
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