Sunday Post

My desire to have a clearer understanding of what is going on in the book as I read more has not been met at all. I am now more confused than I was when I started and I have this strong feeling that the book is only going to confuse me further. Nevertheless, I can't say that I hate this book because I think that Dostoyevsky makes some very interesting points throughout it. The main character frequently revisits the idea, or rather custom, that people have of favoring the journey and not the end result. I think anyone can say they have heard that "it's all about the journey" at least a handful of times in their lifetime. Just as Dostoyevsky writes through the thoughts of his main character, I believe that the journey is more important and that in the end we disregard the final output even if we worked so hard for it. The endpoint exists solely as a remind of the troubles we endured and serves as a fuel for the want of more. Dostoyevsky even writes that "perhaps the only goal on earth to which mankind is striving lies in this incessant process of attaining..." Really, it seems that all we do is traced to us wanting something. We work because we want to support ourselves, we study because we want to get into a good school, we are nice to people because we want to have friends.Anything we do is connected to some sort of basal want.
-Talia Akerman