Comparison of Local Residents and Dostoyevsky's Underground ManI am a sick man....I am an angry man. I am an unattractive man. [...] I don't understand anything about my illness, and I don't know for sure what part of me is affected. I have no treatment for this and never have, although I have great respect for medicine and doctors. [...] No, I refuse the treatment out of spite. (Dostoyevsky 1864: 17) Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote these words around 1864 to describe the mental state of a hyperconscious retired bureaucrat whose excessive analysis and inability to act separated him from the mainstream of society in which he lived. Dostoevsky's Underground Man, as he called his character, is characterized by alienation, villainy, and isolation. Dostoyevsky presents his character's life as a testimony to the possibility of living against an individual's best interests. Frequently, public discussion of the problems that arise in poverty-ridden urban environments is presented as if the inhabitants were copies of Dostoyevsky's story. clandestine men who were distinguished primarily by the fact that they often had less education and more pigment in their skin. In other words, while there are valid comparisons that can be made between the Underground Man and the residents of West Baltimore who are so clearly depicted in The Corner, there are also important differences that make any affirmation of a strict equality between a 19th century Russian intellectual and a 20th century tout or slinger an absurd caricature. Furthermore, the intention of portraying inner-city residents as underground men and women is, frequently, to blame these people for all their own problems, something that is only a middle of paper... and we may be in for another set of disappointing years in the war on poverty and the war on drugs. Works cited and consulted: Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. (1864) Notes from the Underground. Trans. Jessie Coulson. Middlesex, England: Penguin Books. Hacker, Andrew. (1998) Two nations: black and white, separate, hostile, unequal. In Reading between the lines: towards an understanding of current social problems. Ed Amanda Konradi and Martha Schmidt. London: Mayfield Publishing Company. Simon, David & Burns, Edward. (1993) The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood. New York: Broadway Books. Wilson, William Julius. (1998) “Ghetto-Related Behavior and Opportunity Structure” in Reading Between the Lines: Towards an Understanding of Current Social Problems. Ed Amanda Konradi and Martha Schmidt. London: Mayfield Publishing Company.