Comparing The Corner Residents and Dostoevsky’s Underground Man Essay

Comparing The box Residents and Dostoevskys Underground Man I am a stern valet.... I am an angry man. I am an unattractive man. ... I dont understand the least thing about my illness, and I dont know for certain(prenominal) what part of me is affected. I am not having any treatment for it, and never have had, although I have a great respect for practice of medicine and for doctors. ... No, I refuse treatment out of spite. (Dostoevsky 1864 17) Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote these words around 1864 to guide the mental state of a hyperconscious retired bureaucrat whose excessive analysis and unfitness to act separate him from the mainstream of the society in which he lived. Dostoevskys underground man, as he termed his character, is characterized by alienation, spite, and isolation. Dostoevsky presents the life of his character as a recommendation to the possibility of living counter to an individuals own best interests. Frequently, the public argument over the those problems wh ich occur in poverty-ridden urban environments is presented as if the inhabitants were copies of Dostoevskys underground man who differed mainly in that they frequently had less education and more key in their skin. That is to say, although there are valid comparisons that can be haggard between the Underground Man and the inhabitants of west Baltimore who are so vividly depicted in The tree, there are also important differences that wanton any claim of strict equality between a Russian intellectual from the nineteenth century and a 20th-century tout or slinger an smashed caricature. Moreover, the intent of portraying inner-city residents as Underground Men and Women is, frequently, to blame these plenty for all of their own problems, something t... ...and we may be in for another gear of disappointing years in the fight on Poverty and the War on Drugs. Works Cited and Consulted Dostoevsky, Fyodor. (1864) Notes from Underground. Trans. Jessie Coulson. Middlesex, England Penguin Books. Hacker, Andrew. (1998) Two Nations Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal. In Reading mingled with the Lines Toward an Understanding of Current well-disposed Problems. Ed Amanda Konradi and Martha Schmidt. London Mayfield Publishing Company. Simon, David & Burns, Edward. (1993) The Corner A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood. New York Broadway Books. Wilson, William Julius. (1998) Ghetto-Related Behavior and the grammatical construction of Opportunity in Reading Between the Lines Toward an Understanding of Current Social Problems. Ed Amanda Konradi and Martha Schmidt. London Mayfield Publishing Company.