![]() ![]() Because one true thing about the UM is that he needs us to know how smart he is (that's part of what ultimately salvages the book from the brink of failure) so he makes sure we know right from the start that he is capable of saying savagely perceptive things in a surgically precise way. Which is a big problem for the first half of this book, the "essay". He's Ambrose Bierce without the relish, and the only thing that can rescue a narrative from that much self-loathing is a healthy dose of clinical honesty. He is a straw man and I gave you the words you used to despise him, to boot, ass." "You despise me, vividly and at length?" he cries? "Well, I gave you that me that you despise. Not leading us down the garden path to cause us to come to the same conclusions about human worthlessness and venality that he has leading us down the garden path to make us think that's what he's doing, when really he just wants to dick us around. The underground man is doing all these things, and there's a bushel of straight nihilism in his Notes to boot, but mostly what he's doing is fucking us around. But Nabokov also thought Dostoevsky was boring and derivative, so who cares what he thinks?). Show More together and going "LLLOOOOVVVVVEEEEEE SSSSAAAAAMMMMMMSSSSSSSAAAAAAAA" like Gregor Samsa (and, as I've read Nabokov used his lepidopterist skills to establish, never realizing that he had turned into a bug that had wings under its shell and could just buzz off into the sky and let his bug flag fly. ![]()
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