alienation – Ridley Park

★★★★★ – “I Am a Sick Man. I Am a Spiteful Man. I Am, Apparently, Hilarious.”

Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground is a masterclass in misanthropic soliloquy — part philosophical treatise, part psychological farce, and altogether one of the most darkly entertaining monologues I’ve ever had the guilty pleasure of eavesdropping upon. It’s a screaming match between Enlightenment rationality and the petty, pulsing irrationality of actual human life — and guess who wins? (Hint: not the utopians.)

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

The first part, a searing, feverish diatribe, reads like the diary of a man who’s been locked in a room with too much Hegel and not enough human contact. It’s Dostoevsky’s pre-emptive strike against every social engineer who’s ever said, “Well, surely man will behave if we just fix the plumbing.” The Underground Man begs to differ — loudly, neurotically, and with an almost Shakespearean flourish of self-abuse.

But it’s the second part — Apropos of the Wet Snow — where things truly fall gloriously apart. Here the theoretical gives way to the tragically tangible. Our narrator, more unhinged by the page, lurches into society like a moth into a bonfire — vengeful, humiliated, self-aware to the point of paralysis. His disastrous encounter with Liza is almost unbearable in its sincerity and cruelty, a pas de deux of hope and destruction that left me squirming and spellbound.

What surprised me most was the humour. Not the cheap slapstick of caricature, but the agonising, close-to-the-bone absurdity that arises when a man is too clever to be functional and too self-aware to change. The Underground Man doesn’t just dig his hole — he drafts blueprints, writes footnotes, and criticises the soil quality.

As a companion read, Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych provides a poignant counterpoint. Where Tolstoy charts the steady, ghastly march of bourgeois conformity towards a deathbed revelation, Dostoevsky gives us a man already buried in his psyche, clawing at the dirt and calling it philosophy. Ivan Ilych dies trying to make sense of his life; the Underground Man lives trying to make death of sense itself.

Together, they are a fine Russian reminder that being alive is no guarantee of being well — or even remotely rational.

A common question I get about my writing—my fiction, anyway—is: what motivates you?

It sounds like a harmless question. Like asking a plumber what motivates them to fix pipes. But fiction is not plumbing. And motivation, for a writer, is often post-rationalised. Still, I have answers. Or at least fragments of them.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

A primary driver is to convey philosophical concepts that I feel apply to life in general, but don’t tend to get the airtime they deserve. A good example is Heidegger’s Geworfenheit.

In English, that’s usually translated as “thrownness.” It refers to the feeling—no, the condition—of having been thrown into existence without consent, without context, without recourse. It’s the anti-heroic beginning. You wake up on a raft. No map, no memory. Just current.

Now, Heidegger gets a bad rap. And some of it is earned. He joined the Nazi party. There’s no excusing that. But if we’re going to disqualify thinkers based on political affiliation, we’ll need to scrap about half of the Enlightenment and most of the 20th century. The point is: Geworfenheit is useful. It names something modern life often glosses over: the fact that you didn’t choose to be here, and now you have to swim.

This theme shows up across my work. In Temporal Babel, Jef is stranded in a temporally dislocated world. In Sustenance, the visitors are alien in both senses of the word. And in Hemo Sapiens, the title species are cloned into personhood with no legal or cultural footing.

None of us choose how, where, or when we are born. But I like to amplify that truth until it becomes impossible to ignore. Take the Hemo Sapiens case: they aren’t born; they’re instantiated. But what is birth if not a legally sanctioned instantiation? Once you remove the ritual scaffolding of parentage, nationhood, and paperwork, what remains is the raw fact of being.

Another key motivator for me is philosophical provocation—questions I don’t intend to answer, only pose. Like this one: imagine you’re shipwrecked and wash up on a tiny island. A single inhabitant lives there and claims ownership. He tells you to leave or die. You have no weapon. He has a spear. The sea is vast and lethal.

Do you have the right to stay?

Do you take the spear?

Does ownership matter when survival is at stake?

Sustenance explores that tension. Property, sovereignty, mercy, survival—these are themes we pretend to understand until the scaffolding is removed. My aim isn’t to preach about what’s fair. My aim is to show what happens when fairness loses its footing.

Related to this is the theme of otherness. Us versus them. But I’m less interested in dramatising hostility and more interested in the quiet bewilderment that comes when categories fail. What do you call someone who isn’t man or woman, isn’t alive or dead in the way we recognise, doesn’t speak our language or obey our metaphysics? What happens when you meet something you can’t assimilate?

Another layer is cultural construction—the way our societies retrofit meaning onto reality. We build scaffolds. Gender, law, ownership, grief. Then we forget we built them. My fiction likes to peel back the drywall. Not to show the truth, but to reveal the studs. The story behind the story.

And finally, I write because I suspect something important is always missing. That language is never quite enough. So I keep trying. Not to solve the insufficiency, but to dwell inside it.

That’s what motivates me.

Or maybe I’m just trying to answer questions I never knew how to ask.

That too.

Tag: alienation

Notes from the Underground

Geworfenheit: Not Born, Just Here: What Drives My Fiction