Analysis Day 2 Reaction

During today’s lecture we spoke about the underground man’s belief that living after forty is “vulgar” and “bad manners.” The rest of the class had an interpretation of this much like mine; once man has hit forty, (in that time, as the age of forty is what we would now view as the age of 60 or 70), they do not contribute to society in any way and simply take up space. From a logical and objective point of view, once a person becomes old, they have no more use in society and do actually require money and care, yet they do not do anything to provide and improve our society. Though this all makes sense, the reason we keep these people alive is because of our emotional attachments, and it is because of this that the elderly will forever remain a part of our society. Man is incapable of being fully logical with no emotionally driven actions and opinions. The underground man’s battle between rationality and emotion is an accurate representation of the struggle that humans endure during their management of society