After P&C drink and review Poor Righteous from Jailbreak Brewing, they discuss Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky, which has been called the first existentialist novel.
The main character is a miserable creature. He's smart and well educated, but his social skills and are so bad that his life is a mess. He's paralyzed by introspection and self doubt, and believes that men of action are only that way because they're too stupid to think about things as deeply as he does.
The book is divided into two parts. In part one, we hear the older man explaining himself. In part two, we go back to an event in his earlier life that may have contributed to his miserable state.
The themes raised are timely, especially in how they relate to the idea of the perfectibility of man, and the nature / nurture debate.
