Deep Underground Book Club
chapter two
our narrator is a quick and merciless judge of character. in his reminiscing, he manages to make the most innocent of childhood experiences sound off putting- makes himself appear off putting as a child.
his little sarcastic jab at Freud made me laugh. he is decided against an insanity plea it seems.
i think Charlie and his mother were doing the horizontal shuffle. i think the narrator, Freddie, knows this and is pushing the thought away, but for what reason i can’t tell as he doesn’t appear to hold either parent in the regard needed for a self deception like this. maybe to increase he credibility as a witness, a calculated omission.
I find it curious he should assume he will be granted freedom one day.
gin’s been found to be the favourite drink of those with psychopathic tendencies. at the time of writing this wouldn’t have been known yet his description of the taste is an uncanny window into the equation of good with bad, the lack of distinction between the two. it makes me wonder if the narrator character is modelled on a real life man the author knew intimately.
i am confused now as to the setting of when he is writing this. he seemed to be writing in his cell, yet at the last line we are brought jarringly into the courtroom. did he bring his pen and paper with him, to pass the time? does he find his own trial for murder so boring he has to amuse himself writing a memoir?
edit: I’ll have to start calling him Fred or Freddie i suppose, but on some level i don’t really feel that personal connection. there are flashes of recognition, like seeing the pattern of a snake in the grass or a tigers stripes. little things that might draw an eye from across the room, but nothing that would have us on a first name basis.
our narrator is a quick and merciless judge of character. in his reminiscing, he manages to make the most innocent of childhood experiences sound off putting- makes himself appear off putting as a child.
his little sarcastic jab at Freud made me laugh. he is decided against an insanity plea it seems.
i think Charlie and his mother were doing the horizontal shuffle. i think the narrator, Freddie, knows this and is pushing the thought away, but for what reason i can’t tell as he doesn’t appear to hold either parent in the regard needed for a self deception like this. maybe to increase he credibility as a witness, a calculated omission.
I find it curious he should assume he will be granted freedom one day.
gin’s been found to be the favourite drink of those with psychopathic tendencies. at the time of writing this wouldn’t have been known yet his description of the taste is an uncanny window into the equation of good with bad, the lack of distinction between the two. it makes me wonder if the narrator character is modelled on a real life man the author knew intimately.
i am confused now as to the setting of when he is writing this. he seemed to be writing in his cell, yet at the last line we are brought jarringly into the courtroom. did he bring his pen and paper with him, to pass the time? does he find his own trial for murder so boring he has to amuse himself writing a memoir?
edit: I’ll have to start calling him Fred or Freddie i suppose, but on some level i don’t really feel that personal connection. there are flashes of recognition, like seeing the pattern of a snake in the grass or a tigers stripes. little things that might draw an eye from across the room, but nothing that would have us on a first name basis.
From Wikipedia: "The central events of the murder and subsequent flight are based on the 1982 case of Malcolm Edward MacArthur, who killed a young nurse in Dublin during the course of stealing her car." (I'll leave you to look up and read the rest, if you're so inclined.)
The era of the book's setting hit home in how the main character describes homosexuals. They seem to have an exotic and dangerous air to them in his account, like a private gang
That smacked of the '80s, a time during which gay men were able to be more open than they were, but still were disdained or even distrusted by a lot of people.
The era of the book's setting hit home in how the main character describes homosexuals. They seem to have an exotic and dangerous air to them in his account, like a private gang
That smacked of the '80s, a time during which gay men were able to be more open than they were, but still were disdained or even distrusted by a lot of people. The_Silly_Sibyl said:From Wikipedia: "The central events of the murder and subsequent flight are based on the 1982 case of Malcolm Edward MacArthur, who killed a young nurse in Dublin during the course of stealing her car." (I'll leave you to look up and read the rest, if you're so inclined.)
The era of the book's setting hit home in how the main character describes homosexuals. They seem to have an exotic and dangerous air to them in his account, like a private gang That smacked of the '80s, a time during which gay men were able to be more open than they were, but still were disdained or even distrusted by a lot of people.
ah so he doesn’t think he will be released ... he is planning to escape!
im enjoying reading the story without context, largely, and i agree with you on the homosexuality points. because they seem to be distrusted, him associating himself with them even tangentially he shows himself to be unconcerned with aligning himself morally to society. it would make him appear untrustworthy to readers of the time. his condemnation of homosexuality is farcical, and we don’t believe he has conviction in it.
it’s one of the ways in which an aberration from the norm may not actually end up being so wrong headed. because he is so disconnected from social morality, he can see muddily that while there should be something wrong with being gay there is no evidence to say so.
The era of the book's setting hit home in how the main character describes homosexuals. They seem to have an exotic and dangerous air to them in his account, like a private gang
That smacked of the '80s, a time during which gay men were able to be more open than they were, but still were disdained or even distrusted by a lot of people. ah so he doesn’t think he will be released ... he is planning to escape!
im enjoying reading the story without context, largely, and i agree with you on the homosexuality points. because they seem to be distrusted, him associating himself with them even tangentially he shows himself to be unconcerned with aligning himself morally to society. it would make him appear untrustworthy to readers of the time. his condemnation of homosexuality is farcical, and we don’t believe he has conviction in it.
it’s one of the ways in which an aberration from the norm may not actually end up being so wrong headed. because he is so disconnected from social morality, he can see muddily that while there should be something wrong with being gay there is no evidence to say so.
chapter three
initial disgust can't be forever sustained. i find myself lulled along by the prose, the delicacy with which freddie expresses, and those jarring moments of at-odds-ness with human kindness, compassion, start to look like pretty accents in an old gilded text.
then you, i, remember that the events of this chapter follow like this: the man has turned up unannounced to his mother's, kicked her dog, leered over her maid, failed to feel for the state of her health, drank all her alcohol and crashed in his dilapidated childhood room. and all this to ask her for money he needs after a con that he left his wife and child in the lurch for went bad.
yet he still appeals to the court, bounds uninvited into the jury box, and sincerely imagines himself a sympathetic character.
now, when i said he seemed like a normal man...
initial disgust can't be forever sustained. i find myself lulled along by the prose, the delicacy with which freddie expresses, and those jarring moments of at-odds-ness with human kindness, compassion, start to look like pretty accents in an old gilded text.
then you, i, remember that the events of this chapter follow like this: the man has turned up unannounced to his mother's, kicked her dog, leered over her maid, failed to feel for the state of her health, drank all her alcohol and crashed in his dilapidated childhood room. and all this to ask her for money he needs after a con that he left his wife and child in the lurch for went bad.
yet he still appeals to the court, bounds uninvited into the jury box, and sincerely imagines himself a sympathetic character.
now, when i said he seemed like a normal man...
chapter four
i am giving in to the inevitability of feeling identification with a murderous prose writer.
the relationship between anna, daphne and freddie is oddly poignant. i sense that of the two women, anna is the more match for freddie, but too wise for him. daphne is more easily seduced.
there is a soft menace in everything freddie says and does, and on the odd occasion he wrests himself above it there is only an odd absence to be noticed.
there seems to be a sense of projection of his own selfish infantilism onto the women: perhaps they are truly vapid and haughty and surface level, or perhaps that's all that he sees because that's all he understands. however what he does see and understand he describes and investigates with a remarkable sensitivity.
i think he knew anna was too good for him, and is a little disgusted by daphne for not being good enough for him. he is caught in the middle, poor boy, too clever for his class but too emotionally stunted for the big boy leagues.
you have to wonder, as you read, and begin to understand, whether one beetle doesn't recognise another.
i am giving in to the inevitability of feeling identification with a murderous prose writer.
the relationship between anna, daphne and freddie is oddly poignant. i sense that of the two women, anna is the more match for freddie, but too wise for him. daphne is more easily seduced.
there is a soft menace in everything freddie says and does, and on the odd occasion he wrests himself above it there is only an odd absence to be noticed.
there seems to be a sense of projection of his own selfish infantilism onto the women: perhaps they are truly vapid and haughty and surface level, or perhaps that's all that he sees because that's all he understands. however what he does see and understand he describes and investigates with a remarkable sensitivity.
i think he knew anna was too good for him, and is a little disgusted by daphne for not being good enough for him. he is caught in the middle, poor boy, too clever for his class but too emotionally stunted for the big boy leagues.
you have to wonder, as you read, and begin to understand, whether one beetle doesn't recognise another.
the great debate
"The question of good and evil remains in irremediable chaos for those who seek to fathom it in reality. It is mere mental sport to the disputants, who are captives that play with their chains."
The dichotomy of “good and evil” has troubled humanity since the very first civilizations, and it has bothered philosophers even longer. The chaos apparent is in part due to its scope; “good and evil”, as it stands, is not a simple, singular question and should not be treated as such. Semantically, it is not a question at all, it is a common collocation, like “land and sea” or “birth and death”; but unlike these physical antitheses, “good and evil” seems to lack a verifiable scientific construct, and it is left to those with little else but time and lube on their hands to ponder the various vagaries the words imply. The very phrasing of the statement places me, disputant, in manacles, disparaging my admiration for the chain work.
Pretty chain work it is. To analyze good and evil, separately or in opposition, we must first abstract them from reality, to the hypothetical “ultimate good” and “ultimate evil.” This is analogous to the Platonic world of mathematics; the “perfect square” may not exist in the real world, but mathematicians must assume it exists regardless of whether it can be reproduced in reality. So it is with good and evil, eros and thanatos, God and Satan. Here, the would-be philosopher promptly hits a stumbling block. Many of us have only the vaguest concept of “ultimate good”, and while humanity is sharper at condemnation than accreditation, and the depravity of humankind is not to be taken lightly, when considered dispassionately “ultimate evil” is really as unreachable as ultimate good. Therefore we accept this as we accept the impossibility of constructing a perfect 90˚angle.
Continuing in the Ancient Greek tradition, we now should try to find examples of the closest approximation to each extreme occurring in nature. This presents an even greater hurdle fraught with social, ethical, and moral minefields. Even through an anal retentive system of quantification, we can never truly know how close any thought, word or deed is to the concept of ultimate good or ultimate evil. The common solution to this is to redefine “good” and “evil” as mere perceptions of the human mind, not existing externally but present only to the extent that we consider them to be present. “for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” This is convenient and seems, at face value, to make ‘common sense’ particularly in terms of our self-involved culture, but it places the thinker in a quandary regarding the ultimate good / ultimate evil hypothesis. It supposes that there is no such thing; the “ultimate truth” is, like relative perceptions of good, bad, and evil, a figment of the human mind.
Moral relativism, of itself, has a vast array of anthropological support- there do factually exist wide-ranging differences in moral decision-making across cultures. It also has laboratory studies to back it- the famous Zimbardo prison experiment and the Milgram shock experiment both seem to indicate that environment shapes our understanding of what is acceptable behavior. Another satisfyingly scientific conjecture is that human designs of “good” and “evil” are biologically determined. Brain imaging of institutionalized psychopaths shows deficiencies in amygdala function as well as other structural ‘abnormalities’. Oxytocin release in the brain prompts feelings of love and generosity. For completeness sake I include that beyond the individual, morality makes an evolutionary logic (although most evolutionary explanations should be heavily seasoned with skepticism as they are all post-hoc rationale).
However, if we believe in the metaphysical “ultimate good” and “ultimate evil”, differences in considerations of good and evil occur because we do not perceive good and evil precisely or perfectly.
This is a trap. One should never make the mistake of assuming that one’s own culture or personal viewpoint is normative. On the contrary, this view holds that “good” and “evil” as they ought to be, do not exist to be perceived; that is, we cannot observe them in any existing culture. So then, you ask, (I heard you) what relevance, pray tell, has this for real life good and evil? What can we take from this masturbatory cognition to apply to, say, the Nazis, or serial killers, or rapists? The answer is, of course, nothing. All this, when adequately thought about, has zero real-world value.
As of yet, the truth about “good and evil” is not known. For the present moment, we content ourselves with the idea that it exists in entropy somewhere in the median of the didactic absolutes presented here. In that sense it is chaos, in the ‘chaos theory’ sense, possessing an order unmappable by current systems.
And I play with my chains.
The dichotomy of “good and evil” has troubled humanity since the very first civilizations, and it has bothered philosophers even longer. The chaos apparent is in part due to its scope; “good and evil”, as it stands, is not a simple, singular question and should not be treated as such. Semantically, it is not a question at all, it is a common collocation, like “land and sea” or “birth and death”; but unlike these physical antitheses, “good and evil” seems to lack a verifiable scientific construct, and it is left to those with little else but time and lube on their hands to ponder the various vagaries the words imply. The very phrasing of the statement places me, disputant, in manacles, disparaging my admiration for the chain work.
Pretty chain work it is. To analyze good and evil, separately or in opposition, we must first abstract them from reality, to the hypothetical “ultimate good” and “ultimate evil.” This is analogous to the Platonic world of mathematics; the “perfect square” may not exist in the real world, but mathematicians must assume it exists regardless of whether it can be reproduced in reality. So it is with good and evil, eros and thanatos, God and Satan. Here, the would-be philosopher promptly hits a stumbling block. Many of us have only the vaguest concept of “ultimate good”, and while humanity is sharper at condemnation than accreditation, and the depravity of humankind is not to be taken lightly, when considered dispassionately “ultimate evil” is really as unreachable as ultimate good. Therefore we accept this as we accept the impossibility of constructing a perfect 90˚angle.
Continuing in the Ancient Greek tradition, we now should try to find examples of the closest approximation to each extreme occurring in nature. This presents an even greater hurdle fraught with social, ethical, and moral minefields. Even through an anal retentive system of quantification, we can never truly know how close any thought, word or deed is to the concept of ultimate good or ultimate evil. The common solution to this is to redefine “good” and “evil” as mere perceptions of the human mind, not existing externally but present only to the extent that we consider them to be present. “for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” This is convenient and seems, at face value, to make ‘common sense’ particularly in terms of our self-involved culture, but it places the thinker in a quandary regarding the ultimate good / ultimate evil hypothesis. It supposes that there is no such thing; the “ultimate truth” is, like relative perceptions of good, bad, and evil, a figment of the human mind.
Moral relativism, of itself, has a vast array of anthropological support- there do factually exist wide-ranging differences in moral decision-making across cultures. It also has laboratory studies to back it- the famous Zimbardo prison experiment and the Milgram shock experiment both seem to indicate that environment shapes our understanding of what is acceptable behavior. Another satisfyingly scientific conjecture is that human designs of “good” and “evil” are biologically determined. Brain imaging of institutionalized psychopaths shows deficiencies in amygdala function as well as other structural ‘abnormalities’. Oxytocin release in the brain prompts feelings of love and generosity. For completeness sake I include that beyond the individual, morality makes an evolutionary logic (although most evolutionary explanations should be heavily seasoned with skepticism as they are all post-hoc rationale).
However, if we believe in the metaphysical “ultimate good” and “ultimate evil”, differences in considerations of good and evil occur because we do not perceive good and evil precisely or perfectly.
This is a trap. One should never make the mistake of assuming that one’s own culture or personal viewpoint is normative. On the contrary, this view holds that “good” and “evil” as they ought to be, do not exist to be perceived; that is, we cannot observe them in any existing culture. So then, you ask, (I heard you) what relevance, pray tell, has this for real life good and evil? What can we take from this masturbatory cognition to apply to, say, the Nazis, or serial killers, or rapists? The answer is, of course, nothing. All this, when adequately thought about, has zero real-world value.
As of yet, the truth about “good and evil” is not known. For the present moment, we content ourselves with the idea that it exists in entropy somewhere in the median of the didactic absolutes presented here. In that sense it is chaos, in the ‘chaos theory’ sense, possessing an order unmappable by current systems.
And I play with my chains.
Written by exe
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a small treatise on good and evil i wrote under a dead account i would call relevant
i forgot it would post the whole damn thing,oh well.
Guys, I really like that book that you are discussing here. I see you are experts in literary works) I want to ask you for advice, please tell me good books about governments, I need good manuals specifically about US presidents. I found very good stuff here https://gradesfixer.com/free-essay-examples/an-examination-of-the-letter-that-john-quincy-adams-received-from-his-dad-abigail-adams/ but it is not enough for my purposes. There is about the letter that John Quincy Adams received from his dad, but I need more wider information.
i am sorry shaun not-shaun, i think you might be in the wrong aisle, and i don't work here
started chapter five, had a migraine, gave up
chapter five
well, well, well. how the turn tables. i was right, anna is too smart for freddie, and he is infatuated with her wealth and brilliance. i don't say this out of the sharing of a name with her.
i was also right about his mother and charlie behrens. call me sherlock bloody holmes.
now i am stuck on a particular sentence the meaning of which i am lost in. "how could i have imagined i ever loved her?" it's very unclear who this refers to- daphne, anna, or both? i'm going round in circles trying to figure this mans mind out.
while freddie's self pitying and refusal to take responsibility are grating, i think we start to see how he begins to spiral. he is essentially homeless, rejected by his old acquaintances and penniless. he has escaped a brutal revenge for a bad debt, but he is not in the kind of society he believes he belongs to. and his resentment is growing. "i poured myself a brimming glass of wine, and spilled some on the tablecloth, and was glad. oh, dark, dark."
i don't think it is long now before he kills.
started chapter five, had a migraine, gave up
chapter five
well, well, well. how the turn tables. i was right, anna is too smart for freddie, and he is infatuated with her wealth and brilliance. i don't say this out of the sharing of a name with her.
i was also right about his mother and charlie behrens. call me sherlock bloody holmes.
now i am stuck on a particular sentence the meaning of which i am lost in. "how could i have imagined i ever loved her?" it's very unclear who this refers to- daphne, anna, or both? i'm going round in circles trying to figure this mans mind out.
while freddie's self pitying and refusal to take responsibility are grating, i think we start to see how he begins to spiral. he is essentially homeless, rejected by his old acquaintances and penniless. he has escaped a brutal revenge for a bad debt, but he is not in the kind of society he believes he belongs to. and his resentment is growing. "i poured myself a brimming glass of wine, and spilled some on the tablecloth, and was glad. oh, dark, dark."
i don't think it is long now before he kills.
Thank you for keeping up with this, Anna. I’ve been slow due to distractions caused by coursework, but have instituted reading it in bed each night.
Does the main character bring to mind any real-world crimes or criminals you’re familiar with?
Does the main character bring to mind any real-world crimes or criminals you’re familiar with?
