Since I first started reading "Notes From Underground" by Fyodor Dostoevsky, I have noticed that it is extremely similar to "Catcher in the Rye" by J.D Sallinger. Not only is the writing style the same, but the main characters, the underground man and Holden Caulfield, both act and speak a similar way in the books. These two characters both create their version of reality, the underground man with how he feels about the normal man and how Holden imagines a life where time is completely frozen.
Another similarity between the two, is that they both constantly contradict what they have previously said sentences before and they are both incredibly self-conscious. The Underground Man mentions a mouse, that clearly represents himself. "There, in its nasty, stinking, underground home our insulted, crushed, and ridiculed mouse promptly becomes absorbed in cold, malignant and, above all, everlasting spite. For forty years together it will remember its injury down to the smallest, most shameful detail, and every time will add, of itself, details still more shameful, spitefully teasing and irritating itself with its own imagination." (Dostoevesky 11). The Underground man clearly is putting his own past experiences in to the isolated and self- conscious mouse that he describes.
Both the UM and Holden are similar because they isolate themselves by stating that they are in some way above other people. While Holden uses that everyone else is fake and phony to avoid people, the UM says that his cleverness and logic set him apart from normal conscious men. "The worst of it is,no matter how I tried, it still turned out that I was always the most to blame in everything, and what is most humiliating of all, to blame for no fault of my own but, so to say, through the laws of nature. In the first place, to blame because I am cleverer than any of the people surrounding me." (Dostoevesky 9).
Another similarity between the two, is that they both constantly contradict what they have previously said sentences before and they are both incredibly self-conscious. The Underground Man mentions a mouse, that clearly represents himself. "There, in its nasty, stinking, underground home our insulted, crushed, and ridiculed mouse promptly becomes absorbed in cold, malignant and, above all, everlasting spite. For forty years together it will remember its injury down to the smallest, most shameful detail, and every time will add, of itself, details still more shameful, spitefully teasing and irritating itself with its own imagination." (Dostoevesky 11). The Underground man clearly is putting his own past experiences in to the isolated and self- conscious mouse that he describes.
Both the UM and Holden are similar because they isolate themselves by stating that they are in some way above other people. While Holden uses that everyone else is fake and phony to avoid people, the UM says that his cleverness and logic set him apart from normal conscious men. "The worst of it is,no matter how I tried, it still turned out that I was always the most to blame in everything, and what is most humiliating of all, to blame for no fault of my own but, so to say, through the laws of nature. In the first place, to blame because I am cleverer than any of the people surrounding me." (Dostoevesky 9).
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