Comparing The Corner Residents and Dostoevsky’s Underground Man Essay

Comparing The Corner Residents and Dostoevskys Underground human beings I am a sick man.... I am an baseless man. I am an unattractive man. ... I dont understand the least issue about my illness, and I dont know for certain what part of me is affected. I am not having any give-and-take for it, and never prep are had, although I have a great respect for medicine and for doctors. ... No, I refuse treatment out of spite. (Dostoevsky 1864 17) Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote these words around 1864 to describe the mental state of a hyperconscious retired bureaucrat whose excessive analysis and inability to act separate him from the mainstream of the partnership in which he lived. Dostoevskys underground man, as he termed his character, is characterized by alienation, spite, and isolation. Dostoevsky presents the support of his character as a testimonial to the possibility of living reappearance to an individuals own best interests. Frequently, the public debate over the those probl ems which occur in poverty-ridden urban environments is presented as if the inhabitants were copies of Dostoevskys underground man who differed mainly in that they a great deal had less education and more pigment in their skin. That is to say, although in that respect are valid comparisons that can be drawn between the Underground cosmos and the inhabitants of west Baltimore who are so vividly depicted in The Corner, there are also important differences that make any claim of nonindulgent equality between a Russian intellectual from the nineteenth degree Celsius and a 20th-century tout or slinger an absurd caricature. Moreover, the intent of portraying inner-city residents as Underground Men and Women is, frequently, to blame these people for all of their own problems, something t... ...and we whitethorn be in for another string of disappointing years in the War on Poverty and the War on Drugs. Works Cited and Consulted Dostoevsky, Fyodor. (1864) Notes from Underground. Tra ns. Jessie Coulson. Middlesex, England Penguin Books. Hacker, Andrew. (1998) two Nations Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal. In learning Between the Lines Toward an Understanding of Current mixer Problems. Ed Amanda Konradi and Martha Schmidt. London Mayfield publication Company. Simon, David & Burns, Edward. (1993) The Corner A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood. New York Broadway Books. Wilson, William Julius. (1998) Ghetto-Related Behavior and the Structure of Opportunity in Reading Between the Lines Toward an Understanding of Current Social Problems. Ed Amanda Konradi and Martha Schmidt. London Mayfield Publishing Company.