A short gloss of Notes from Underground:
A man will be agonized in the simultaneous pursuit of two different lives with two different goals for living.
In particular a minor civil servant who seeks neither promotion nor pay raise visits a whore house despite his saintly aspirations, and in the process experiences immense pain and the faint glow of a quickly self-sabotaged hope over and over again.
It is thus a portrayal of self-loathing, popular on account of the ubiquity of this experience, but meaningful on account of this particular cause: the simultaneous pursuit of two lives which are, ultimately, mutually exclusive.
>>9928264
Literally me