Public space in Fiction

Public space in fiction serves as a means of identifying aspects of the characters of the people who inhabit those spaces. The characters in Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky, L'Assommoir by Emile Zola, and Last Nights of Paris by Philippe Soupault also illustrate multiple social meanings and serve as a means for the authors to criticize their own society.

The theory of human nature and the meaning of life that is offered by the Underground Man in Notes from Underground derives from his personality and his particular experiences in the world. Those experience have left him angry and spiteful, and in part his "theory" of human nature is a spiteful reaction to the way he himself has been treated. He seems obsessed with developing this theory, as if he will be able to codify all human conduct and explain it by means of his view of why people behave in a certain way. This theory takes on a particular resonance because of the man who delivers it. He explains this theory to the reader, and as he does so he also tells much about his experiences, those that shaped his philosophy and contributed to his theory. The Underground Man has no name and is only known as The Underground Man, further removing him from the world of "normal" humans. He is the outsider, the observer. He celebrates his differences with the world, and in so doing he affirms the importance of freedom. He is an unpleasant man in many respects, yet the reader is wooed into being on his side as fa

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thing that really matters--freedom. The Underground Man knows what the rational man values, and he rejects everything that comes under this heading. He sees that this is not a rational world because suffering is possible, and suffering would not be allowed in a rational world. Human beings act as if the world were rational when it is not. As noted, the Underground Man's thesis is not entirely consistent, for he has arrived at it through the exercise of his rational faculty, and though he indulges the emotions, he develops a theory based on the reason that he rejects. In addition, though he celebrates freedom, he is not completely free. No one can be completely free in the world, for everyone is shaped by the environment, by the society of which they are a part, and even if they reject that society, the act of rejection has been shaped by exposure to the society. Emile Zola's L'Assommoir openly undertakes a dissection of what Zola called a corrupt society, and the author addressed the then-current ideas about heredity and genetic taint. The story is that of Gervaise, but more than this, the story is that of the society in which she lives. She reacts to the world around her with a certain cheeriness, showing that even wh

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