Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, written by Paul Schrader, both tell the same story about a man who is lonely and blames the world around him for his loneliness. The characters of Underground Man and Travis Bickle mirror each other; they both live in the underground, narrating their respective stories, experiencing aches and maladies which they leave unchecked, seeing the city they live in as a modern-day hell filled with the fake and corrupt. However, time and again both Travis and the Underground Man contradict their own selves. While the underground character preaches his contempt for civilization—the ‘aboveground’—and the people within it, he constantly displays a deep-seeded longing to be a part of it. Both characters believe in a strong ideal that challenges that of the city’s, an ideal that is personified in the character of the prostitute. He constantly attempts to seek out revenge, but the concept of revenge, paired with the underground character’s actions and inertia, becomes problematic with the underground ideal. The underground character is steeped in contradiction, and how one interprets his actions, or his inactions, is what ultimately determines whether the he is, truly, an underground man.
Notes from the Underground and Taxi Driver both depict a protagonist, the underground character, who scoffs and scorns at those aboveground, termed the “normal man” (PDF 15). Notes describes the normal man as someone with “normal interests,” who “act[s] in accordance with the laws of reason and truth” (). Notes was written at the time of the Enlightenment, and used to criticize the then-popular theory of material determinism: that “all choice and reasoning can be…calculated” by scie...
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...er hero”. He keeps the newspaper clippings praising his heroic endeavor on his wall, perhaps insinuating that he has started to believe that what he has done was heroic, and ultimately justifying what he has done as for the best interest of humankind, and in accordance to the normal interests of “reason, honour, [and] peace” (). Although he regrets it, the Underground Man’s inability to commit to one action, to save Liza or to repulse her, to seek revenge or attempt fit in, is what ultimately keeps him from connecting with others, it is what keeps him in the underground. Travis’ commitment to action ultimately leads him aboveground.
Works Cited
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes from Underground: A New Translation, Backgrounds and Sources, Responses, Criticism. Norton Critical Edition. New York: Norton, 1989.
Taxi Driver. Directed by Martin Scorsese. Columbia, 1976.
In this poem, “On the Subway”, written by Sharon Olds brings two worlds into proximity. We will identify the contrast that develops both portraits in the poem and discuss the insights the narrator comes to because of the experience. The author refers to several literary techniques as tone, poetic devices, imagery, and organization. The poem talks about a historical view based on black and white skin. It positions the two worlds the point of view of a black skinned and a white skinned. The boy is described as having a casual cold look for a mugger and alert under the hooded lids. On the other hand, based on his appearance the white skinned person felt threatened by the black boy. She was frightened that he could take her coat, brief case, and
One of the most important elements in Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground is Wright’s careful use of sensory descriptions, imagery, and light to depict Fred Daniels’ experiences both above and below ground. Wright’s uses these depictions of Fred Daniels underground world to create incomplete pictures of the experiences he has and of the people he encounters. These half-images fuel the idea that The Man Who Lived Underground is a dark and twisted allusion to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.
Frequently, the public debate over the those problems which occur in poverty-ridden urban environments is presented as if the inhabitants were copies of Dostoevsky's underground man who differed mainly in that they frequently had less education and more pigment in their skin. That is to say, although there are valid comparisons that can be drawn between the Underground Man and the inhabitants of west Baltimore who are so vividly depicted in The Corner, there are also important differences that make any claim of strict equality between a Russian intellectual from the nineteenth century and a 20th-century tout or slinger an absurd caricature. Moreover, the intent of portraying inner-city residents as Underground Men and Women is, frequently, to blame these people for all of their own problems, something t...
Hansen, Bruce. “Dostoevsky’s Theodicy.” Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University, 1996. At . accessed 18 November 2001.
Dostoyevsky's writing in this book is such that the characters and setting around the main subject, Raskolnikov, are used with powerful consequences. The setting is both symbolic and has a power that affects all whom reside there, most notably Raskolnikov. An effective Structure is also used to show changes to the plot's direction and Raskolnikov's character. To add to this, the author's word choice and imagery are often extremely descriptive, and enhance the impact at every stage of Raskolnikov's changing fortunes and character. All of these features aid in the portrayal of Raskolnikov's downfall and subsequent rise.
It is a given that our culture will vary differently than of one that dwells in the tunnel. In prehistoric time, the underground was seen as a place of safety, much like it is seen today for the mole people. Throughout literature, the underground man, as Toth explains, is extreme, withdrawn and isolated. He is self exiled from human society and only maintains as much contacted as needed to survive. He believes in nothing and is often filled with rage and anguish (177). Many of the tunnel dwellers share many of the same practices and use of material objects key to their survival like eating rodents, using loose electrical wires for electricity, finding water through leaky pipes and cardboard and garbage for building a home. They all share the same knowledge and ideas of how live in the tunnels. They evolve by the changes in their environment and learn how to change to better protect themselves from predators like outsiders or from the dangers of trains. They have norms like we do but what they considered to be a norm, is what we may see as a folkway. Some may even develop their own language so others in their group can understand them. The nature of this counterculture and its formation shows that our society has the ability to create various countercultures that can either show how we excel or fail as a society. However it does show that if we were to
Adapted from the novella written by James M. Cain, Double Indemnity is a melodramatic film noir that highlights the conflict its characters face through adultery and murder which develops from the dissatisfaction and alienation that arose in the era of modernity as shown in most noir films. Unlike most noir films, Double Indemnity set the bar in terms of structural themes to follow and elements that eventually came to be considered essential in the noir genre. The film was seen to be a full embodiment of what the genre should be. Double Indemnity is an archetypal noir film, which portrays noir elements through its style, the characters, its writers’ backstory and the history of Los Angeles, the city in which it is set. This essay will examine how Los Angeles is integrated not only into the location but also into the storyline of the characters and their motivations but also the filmmakers’ lives. It does this through characteristic noir motifs like “the urban cultural landscape, the lack of rootedness of the characters, and the self-deceptions that center their world” (p. 437) affect the protagonists in the film. Double Indemnity’s use of Los Angeles as its primary location exposes the innate decadence and decay of the city through film noir stylistic elements. Billy Wilder directed Double Indemnity and the film became the archetypal noir film because it embodied all the characteristics of a typical noir film, which include “claustrophobia, paranoia, despair and nihilism” (Place and Peterson, p. 327) course kit source. Los Angeles, the city used primarily as the location in the film becomes not merely a backdrop but a character in the film through its physical and implied characteristics. The context through the stories of Wild...
Crime and Punishment and Notes from the Underground Fyodor Dostoyevsky's stories are stories of a sort of rebirth. He weaves a tale of severe human suffering and how each character attempts to escape from this misery. In the novel Crime and Punishment, he tells the story of Raskolnikov, a former student who murders an old pawnbroker as an attempt to prove a theory. In Notes from the Underground, we are given a chance to explore Dostoyevsky's opinion of human beings.
Kjetsaa, Geir. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, A Writer's Life. New York, New York: Viking Penguin Inc., 1987,
Fanger, Donald. Introduction. Notes From Underground. By Fyodor Dostoevsky. Trans. Mirra Ginsburg. NY: Bantam, 1992.
..., his physical inertia thwarts his aggressive desires and he has compulsive talk of himself but has no firm discussion (Frank 50). Moreover, the underground man is full of contempt for readers but is desperate that the reader understands, he reads very widely but writes shallowly, he depicts the social thinkers as superficial and he desires to collide with reality but has no ability to do this. Therefore the underground man is completely emotional, babbly with no real form.
The underground man is the product of the social determinism due to all the personal experiences that he had throughout his life with the society. He is a person who always wanted act in a different way but he stops himself and act as how the society wants him
Released more than a decade apart, Kerouac's On the Road and Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider are replete with parallels. Both depict characters whose beliefs are not quite uniform with those of society; in both cases these characters set out in search of "kicks" but become part of something larger along the way. More importantly, these two texts each comment insightfully on the culture of their respective times. But all these similarities become superficial in the face of the inherent differences between the two.
After Scorsese’s father asking him a question about a character, a young Martin raised his fingers to make an impression of him shooting a gun. This image is one of the most memorable images in Scorsese’s film Taxi Driver, where we see Robert De Niro repeating the same image pointing to his temples. This image is shown at the height of the film. When Scorsese got a television at home, no more did he have to leave his house to engross himself in the most recent movie best seller. Already we can see Scorsese’s love of filmmaking from an extremely young
Beginning with Notes from the Underground this forlorn, ailing man is so caught up in his own head he completely forgets about everything significant in life. He broods and dwells on how unfair the world is, yet never takes responsibility for his own actions. The underground man is so trapped in his mind it is as if he is living in his own reality. Assuming farfetched opinions about what other people are thinking and doing. Time after time people are callous to this man, but he fails to realize this is due to his own cruel actions. At one point, he gives up on love. Towards the end the man ends up alone in his corner; making notes about life. "To care only for well-being seems to me positively ill-bred. Whether it's good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things." Whenever this man finds tiniest bit of happiness, he takes two steps back and destroys it. He never seems to realize the damage he is doing, but because it happens to him so frequently it seems like he does not want to be happy. “I could not become anything...