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.