Notes From Underground By Joseph Conrad, Fyodor Dostoevo's Notes From Underground?

Literature evolved in the early ages and is still evolving today. Writers Joseph Conrad, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Guillermo Del Toro all display an uncommon style of literature. In Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, he writes about the realist fiction that has developed around the nineteenth-century in Russian intelligentsia. Conrad’s novel called The Secret Agent takes place in London in 1886 before the Greenwich bombing. “Pan’s Labyrinth” by Toro takes place after the Spanish Civil War 1944. Each work displays similar qualities across the borders of both time and earth. They each reflect the changing culture of their time period. All three put forth the sentiments of revolution and social change, while tackling the feelings of alienation and navigating the labyrinths of symbolism.

From the nineteenth century to the twentieth century, revolutions have been changing the face of the earth. The novel Notes from Underground was written and set in St. Petersburg, Russia. During this time Russia was aimed on increasing and expressing its power. The 19th century was preceded but the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. The Enlightenment was a period that valued reason, belonging it to be the was improve society and man. The Industrial Revolution was paced on science and math, increasing the access to machinery and mass production. Serfdom was the previous social institution that existed preceding the Industrial Revolution, and with the rise of westernization, many thinkers called for reform. These thinkers were exemplified by Dostoevsky’s novel. The Secret Agent takes place in London before the Greenwich bombing. “The attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory: a blood-stained inanity of so fatuous a kind that is impossible ...

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...Agent. Both feel called to action, but when action is in front of them, asking them make a decision, they change their minds. Both are pessimists of the world, and both are desperate to see society and its twisted norms slowly go away. Even their names both symbolize a certain aspect; the man underground or the man that is hidden away, and the professor which is a name omits him from the rest of the classroom. Verloc has chosen a job that keeps him from the usual and allows it to alienate himself from others. Though his family’s falling relationship influences him be alone. When Verloc dies he sees his family fall apart in front of him. Mr. Verloc is like the Underground man because he alienates himself from getting close to other people. Mr. Verloc is like the underground man in the way he distances himself from everything including his wife, family, and world.