[...] the speaker has involved the reader from the beginning, addressing him directly, anticipating his reactions, preempting his judgments, denying him the comfortable role of spectator.

These "notes" are a performance, part tirade, part memor, by a nameless personage who claims to be writing for himself alone but who consistently manipulates the reader--of whom he is morbidly aware--to the point where there seems to be no judgment the reader can make which the writer has not already made himself. In the absence of any other source of information or perspective, we suffer his contradictions no less helplessly than he does. For Dostoevsky's presence as author is enigmatic and minimal, confined to a pararaph of introduction and three laconic sentences of conclusion.

[...] I even think that the best definition of man is: a biped, ungrateful. [...]

[...] give him such economic prosperity that he'll have nothing left to do but sleep, eat pastries, and busy himself with assuring the continuance of world history. And even then [...] He'll even risk his pastries and deliberately choose the most pernicious nonsense [...]

Man loves to create [...] But when, then, does he also passionately love destruction and chaos? Tell me that! [...] Can it be that he is so dedicated to destruction and chaos [...], because is himself instinctively afraid of achieving his goal and completing the edifice he is constructing? [...]

[...] man is a flighty, deplorable creature, and, like a chess player, he may be fond only of the process of achieving the goal, rather than of the goal itself. [...] perhaps the only goal toward which mankind is striving on earth consists of nothing but the continuity of the process of achieving--in other words, of life itself, and not the goal proper [...]

[...] he sails across oceans, he sacrifices his life in this quest, but, I would swear, he's somehow afraid of really finding, discovering it. For he feels that, as soon as he finds it, there will be nothing to search for. [...] He is fond of striving toward achievement, but not so very fond of the achieveent itself [...]

Another thing tormented me in those days: the fact that no one else was like me, and I was like no one else. I am alone, I thought, and they are everybody. And I worried about it.

[...] Either a hero, or mud; there was no middle. Indeed, this is what ruined me, because, mired down in filth, I would console myself with the thought that at other times I was a hero, and the hero redeemed the filth. As if to say: it would be shameful for an ordinary man to get mired down, but a hero is too sublime to be completely defiled, hence he could wallow in filth.

"But why twenty-one?" I asked with some agitation, perhaps even with resentment. "Counting me, it will be twenty-eight rubles, not twenty-one."

It seemed to me that this sudden and unexpected offer to join in would be a handsome gesture; it would immediately win them over and raise me in their estimaton.

[...]

"But why? I'd think I'm also an old schoolmate, and, frankly, I resent being left out." I began to boil over again.

I sat ignored by everyone, crushed and annihilated.

Good Lord, is this fit company for me? I thought. And what a fool I've made of myself before them! [...] The numbskulls think they've done me a favor by letting me sit at their table, they don't understand that it's I, I who am honoring them, and not the other way around.

[...] I was furious with myself but, naturally, she was the one who would pay. A terrible anger against her surged through my heart; I could have killed her. [...]