Notes from the Underground

This book is pretty interesting because, it was something way different then the other book that we had read (heart of darkness) and the reason is because in the other book they are talking about how this guy became a sailor, and how Mr. Kurtz was pretty greedy and stuff like that, but in this book it is this 40 year that is talking about how when you are 40 years old it is the worst age and he is really negative about it and he talks about justice and he repeats himself about things, and he sometime contradicts himself and then he says that some of the things that he had said were true.
Something’s that I really like about this book is that he talks about how even when you have pain it is enjoyable for example he talks about how when you have a toothache there is enjoyment because you cry and you laugh and then he says that if he didn’t moan he would find enjoyment in those moans.
In this book he also mentions revenge and how some people thought that having a revenge would be justice and my group members and I started talking about what was justice? And if having revenge be called as justice?. Another question that was brought up while we were reading actually came from the book and it was “Can a man who attempts to find enjoyment in the very feeling of his own degradation possibly have a spark of respect for himself?
There was this very interesting quote in the book that said “ I a m a sick man…. I am a spiteful man. I a m an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased “. I really likes this quote because I mean I wasn’t expecting a book to start off this way and because I could actually connect it to real life because, there are people out there that have really low self esteem and they think they are the worst people in the world and how no one will ever like them.

Heart of Darkness Author: Joseph Conrad

Characters
Doctor
Marlow
Russian man
Chief accountant
Natives
Mr. Kurts

When I was reading this book it was a bit difficult because if you didn't read it carefully then you wouldn't understand the book because this author writes lots of similes and if you don't read them carefully then you wouldn't understand that part. Something that was really confusing to me was were the story actually took place because I mean I knew that they were in a ship and they were in a river but then he starts like talking about how he became a sailor and I didn’t know if what was happening like them being attacked was happening in the present or in the past.
This book was really good because you could actually picture the things he is talking about for example in Pg. 53 the first sentence it talks about these heads that have been chopped off and how they looked like. I could actually visualize how the heads looked like because of the word chose for example “black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids, a head that seemed to be sleeping on top of that pole.” I also liked some of the similes that he decided to work because instead of saying the sky was dark he would say “a sky the color of smoke.”
Something that I figured out using the text was the word ivory because in the book it is know to be like money but I didn’t know that then they started talking about how Mr. Kurts was addicted to it and that he only wanted it for himself so that kind of helped me figure out it was money, then I asked my group members and they said the same thing.