Theme Of Love In Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground

Haunted
“To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise.”
~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground It begins with a child, a little girl with stars in her eyes and flowers in her hair, stubbed toes and scraped knees, all excitement and energy and love and optimism. The little girl has a heart made of bright, shining lights. She knows how much it hurts when her best friend tells her that she’s not her first choice when it comes to company, that the only reason she sticks around is because there’s no one else to talk to, and for the first time, a light in her bright little heart grows dim. Her first love is her best friend’s brother, who never sees the way she looks at him with wide eyes of wonder and affection. He realizes how odd she is and how lacking her group of friends is and takes pity upon that, treating her well and civilly. That is not the last time she will experience feeling like a charity case, but it is the first, and she’ll never fully understand why he couldn’t just actually care about her, rather than pretend to. She realizes that he will never care
The little girl becomes bigger, but her eyes grow dimmer. Her heart breaks when she is told that a girl she thought was her closest friend, her sister, almost, cannot bear being around her and only barely tolerates her presence. And that sets off a chain reaction of lights shutting down. Her soul, chained to a wall of insecurity and misery, suffers the slinging of insults like rotten fruit: annoying, obnoxious, stupid, fat. The girl begins to feel that no one could ever possibly care about her as much as she cared about them, but she accepts it. Her love is a river rushing through the canyon of life and everyone else’s run parallel to hers. It isn’t that theirs are any less deep or beautiful or shiny, merely that there is no possibility for her river to intersect theirs. Waters have set paths they must follow, predestined from the start by those who came before