Final Post

This book was probably the most annoying work I’ve ever had to read. It was hard to understand, time consuming despite its small size, and packed a lot of information into every paragraph, which made me miss a lot of what he was saying in most pages. Like I’ve said before, I thought I understood a paragraph and I the next day I would be sitting in class listening to what it actually meant and I would just think to myself “What is happening?”. To be honest, it wouldn’t be a book I would recommend reading unless it will later be discussed because a lot of outside help is needed to understand the complex work of Dostoyevsky. As for my outside help, the discussion was vital to my understanding of the book. It was frustrating to have an idea about what Dostoyevsky was saying and then have that idea completely revoked the next day in the class discussion, but at the end of class, I was glad I got a little more understanding on this work because the only thing worse than being wrong is having total doubt, which is what I had up until the discussion times. I enjoyed the discussions, and although I didn’t talk very much, I was always aware of what everyone was saying and I would be able to relate what they were saying to the written words. It was as if something clicked in my head as the ideas were thrown out and I suddenly understood Dostoyevsky, at least a little. It was an interesting read because it was just so compact and full of information in such little words. He is easily the most efficient writer I think I will encounter for a while. Although he would ramble, he rambled in a way that one word meant twenty other words and so a paragraph was actually pages worth of information.

The topic of talk I most remember is the most advantageous advantage. Human free will is a God given gift (and I say that because I am religious) and I agree with Dostoyevsky that we are pathetically ungrateful to what we have been given. Our souls are what differentiate us from all other animals, our ability to stray away from what our instincts want us to do. It’s funny because that topic had actually crossed my mind a couple times even before the book discussions, but I never really realized the complexity of it. The fact that we make bad decisions on purpose to prove to ourselves that we can. It is selfish of us because if we truly followed our instincts, many of the problems we have today would not be an issue.