Day 1 Analysis Reaction

After analyzing and discussing the first few paragraphs of NFTU with the class, I was enlightened about some of the things that I had not noticed before.  I realized that the reason the narrator is so paradoxical is because of his extremely high intelligence. From Shap’s lecture a while back, we learned that the people with extremely high or low IQ’s cannot function in society. The underground man sees both sides of every argument with complete clarity, which is why he is such a contradictory character, and considers himself “inactive.” We left off in the paragraph where the narrator talks about how living beyond forty is “bad manners,” yet he will live to eighty if his body allows it. Why does he perceive old age as a negative thing? In my opinion, he feels that people who live past forty are “worthless fools” because they no longer contribute to the world, and their time has passed. This made me think of the Kafka lecture; “In The Penal Colony” in particular. The officer in the story, much like the “old” people the narrator talks about, has devoted his life to the rules of his time, but times changed and betrayed him. Now, he is worthless and cannot affect society in a positive way. I feel as though the underground man believes that people living past forty are fools because they no longer have a place in society and essentially are a “waste of space.”