"Belief In Our Own Things"

    I would like to start out saying that the order of books that we have read makes absolute sense as their themes and ideas flow within each other. I found found glimmers of both Atlas Shrugged and Notes from the Underground already in the first twenty pages of Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending.
    Before even seeing the name Dostoevsky I noticed many parallels between the two novels. “It was just that we wanted to believe in our own things, rather than what had been decided for us” (7). Like the narrator in Notes from the Underground, this narrator too wants to be able to experience the world as a blank slate. He does not want to allow exterior forces like society, the three institutions, or even man to distort his own perceptions of the world; rather, he wants to be able to experience his own fresh and unique perspective. The narrator craves desperately to explain the world not through arithmetic or religion but on his accord.
    Furthermore, the narrator is haunted by ‘evil’ beings that are his parents. I state that they are evil because like those in the outside world, the narrator’s parents want him to participate in the road map that was drawn for all human beings the minute they were brought to this Earth. His parents are yet another force pushing him to be standardized and de-individualized. 
    But despite the constant nagging, the narrator attempts to engage in a seemingly helpless battle against the outside world. In my annotations I write that the narrator is underground similar to the narrator in Notes from the Underground. He is hitting a critical point of transition between clarity to the dark cloud that surrounds adults as they continue in the cycle of the four seasons as we discussed in the Atlas Shrugged lectures.
    I am hopeful that because I enjoyed Notes from the Underground so much that I will just as much love this novel. It seems that because there is already a plethora of parallels between the two novels that it is in the realm of possibilities!