Reaction

             It is interesting to see how the part 1 narrator’s thoughts and beliefs are played out in the second part. The second narrator is crazier and more extreme than the first narrator. I think he suffers from some kind of mental lunacy because he always creates his daily events into a much more threatening and grand scheme. He isolates himself from a community where societal rank is the major determinant of personal interactions. He says, “I love justice, truth, and honesty” and complains that others focus too much on “generals, colonels and kammer junkers.” Yet, he treats people who do his labor like cleaning his house and serving him food as peasants and slaves. Dostoyevsky establishes this contradiction to emphasize the idea that man’s inherent desire is to make himself and others suffer. We are all at falsehood with ourselves because we focus too much on how society works and our interactions with others.