For this week’s readings, I wanted to focus my blog post solely on Notes From Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Particularly, I wanted to focus on the first two chapters of this book and the way the the book itself begins, addressing one particular group of gentlemen. The main character begins speaking about how his health is in decline and he has taken no medical action to receive treatment. It is presumed that it is cancer, but he has been feeling this liver pain getting increasingly worse as years go on and he gets older. While he hates the idea of aging and claims that only “scoundrels” will willingly live past age forty, he goes on a tangent about how he may live to sixty or even eighty years old. This entire monologue seems to put the main character in an unstable headspace with a bit of a manic undertone. Maybe this is a result of his health being as poor as it is and him being forty in the nineteenth century, which was an average lifespan at the time due to a lack of modern medicine still. When discussing death and the human condition, he makes the declaration that “…even if you had enough time and faith left to change yourself into something different, you probably would not wish to change; and even if you did wish it, you would still not do anything, because in fact there is perhaps nothing to change into”(Dostoevsky 8). This existential statement goes to show that even in times of trouble or despair, when one is reaching their final moments in life and beginning to think about who they truly are a person and in their faith, there may not be enough time to make amends to the mistakes of your past. He notes that you may still be strong in your faith but at that point in your life, you have lost a lot of your will to live and thus, it would make personal growth and change, difficult, maybe impossible, and basically useless.