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"Because I only like playing with words, only dreaming, but, do you know, what I really want is that you should all go to hell. That is what I want. I want peace; yes, I'd sell the whole world for a farthing, straight off, so long as I was left in peace."

I ponder his words as I sit in his disturbed and confused underground mind, this mind supposedly brilliant, yet also a heap of self-destruction; these words which offer some profundity, some lackluster chit-chatter. It makes me consider how we all want peace, to be left in peace, and yet we sometimes create our own tragedies, our own tortured existence. Our own underground.

Play with words that leave me cold in the first few pages, will you, underground man, and then lure me when I'm halfway in, only to bore me again. For this book seems to lack a beginning or end, the semi-existent scenes torment each other, a contradictory heap of sentences, as if Dostoyevsky had unaligned and unfinished thoughts. When the tone of a psychological novel isn't grabbing, and the protagonist seems to be trapped within his own mind, I seek other cues, like that of the mood which enveloped me in The Days of Abandonment, or the heightened self-consciousness in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or the deeply entrenched thematics of The Brothers Karamazov, or the texture within The Sorrows of Young Werther and Selected Writings. Somehow, I couldn't hold on to any such thing within this novel. Perhaps I'm confined to my own underground, so I'm sure my underground protagonist wouldn't mind that I'm not raving about his rants.

It's not as if his rants aren't appealing at times, after all, the guy is on a roll. He thinks being forty means he's old (someone should tell him that forty is now the new thirty), and he swears that he doesn't believe one word of what he's written. Just when you think he's really gone off the deep end, he shows you he is still very self-aware: "You boast of consciousness, but you are not sure of your ground, for though your mind works, yet your heart is darkened and corrupt, and you cannot have a full, genuine consciousness without a pure heart. And how intrusive you are, how you insist and grimace! Lies, lies, lies!"

And there are those moments, when his words pierce the subconscious:

And so, furtively, timidly, in solitude, at night, I indulged in filthy vice, with a feeling of shame which never deserted me, even at the most loathsome moments, and which at such moments nearly made me curse. Already even then I had my underground world in my soul. I was fearfully afraid of being seen, of being met, of being recognised. I visited various obscure haunts.

I wish I'd had more of these moments because although I don't reach the depths I yearn for, I linger with the 'voice' of this underground man when he reaches those moments of self-aware insanity and the narration produces some form of clarity through intimacy, because let's face it, otherwise, we don't really know this underground man, do we? His annoying inconsistency showcases humanity's perversity, his disdain of the real world, I understand, even when I can't grasp the reasoning for his odd treatment of Liza and of his friends. Perhaps I'll find this "scoundrel's" beginning and his end, when I read Crime and Punishment. Ah, Dostoyevsky, you trickster.