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“There was one novel above all others, Knight said, that sparked in him the rare and unnerving sensation that writer was reaching through time and speaking directly to him: Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground. "I recognize myself in the main character," he said, referring to the angry and misanthropic narrator, who has lived apart form all others for about twenty years. The book's opening lines are: "I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man I am an unattractive man." Knight also expressed no shortage of self-loathing, but it was offset by a fierce pride, as well as an occasional trace of superiority. So, too, with the unnamed narrator of Underground . On the final page of the book, the narrator drops all humbleness and says what he feels: "I have only in my life carried to an extreme what you have not dared to carry halfway, and what's more, you have taken your cowardice for good sense, and have found comfort in deceiving yourselves. So that perhaps, after all, there is more life in me than in you.” — Michael Finkel