What does IQfy think about this book? I just finished it and I don't think I get it.
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No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai
What does IQfy think about this book? I just finished it and I don't think I get it.
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UFOs Are A Psyop Shirt $21.68 |
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Nothing to get. It's the self-obsessed ramblings of a total coward and dogshit writer. A bloated suicide note and nothing more. IQfy felates this mudskipper because it makes them think their own worthless, miserable lives are equally as worthy of publication. They're not, and neither is this two-hundred page skid mark.
insuperably based
Upvoted
not everyone who reads it is idolizing his behavior though? it was an interesting look into someone who lacks identity and feels estranged because of it, people should look at it with the historical context given in the prologue instead of mindlessly self inserting..
'Interesting' in the same way Ronnie McNutt's final livestream was 'interesting' to watch. Seethe, virgin. Dazai's 'reflections' are beyond asinine (we get it: everything is pointless and we all die in the end and it's all for nothing derp) and offer nothing of value to a reader looking to (a) glean anything about post-war Japanese society or (b) mental health.
The book is still depressing though. But the only good point about depression is when Yozo says that he was just born with, with this feeling. And I can relate.
You haven't read the book or your analysis skills are lacking because there's no way you'd come to these reductionist conclusions otherwise
I assure you the analysis is spot on, but you're welcome to post a counter-argument.
>"You haven't read the book or your analysis skills are lacking..."
> Doesn't offer any of his own analyses.
homosexuals like you are the bane of this board. kys
you made a claim, anon told you you're wrong, now you're supposed to back up the claim you made. instead you chose ad hominum
I see the morons have woken up. Anon claimed I was wrong, but failed to demonstrate how in any way. The burden is on him. See how that works?
Checked. But I disagree with your take on the book. If these still work this was my take:
I think you were filtered in failing to recognize that judgment is a key theme in the book.
Hi anon, I was the one who posted
I think your point about judgment is very necessary, and honestly anyone who was conscious while reading the book should be aware that the narrator is not condoning his own attitude or behavior. I think
is either a bait post or just someone who's upset about the concept of nihilism and so wants to project it upon a story that has some superficial association with a nihilistic point of view, and due to those preconceived notions was not able to see it for what it is. This example can offer an opportunity for criticism of the way IQfy approaches literature in general, the cargo cult mentality and the constant meta-discussion of authors, rather than low-level discussion of texts, means that people have a ton of nonsensical, emotionally charged ideas about what books are, what they symbolize, etc., which get in the way of seeing the reality, especially in a case like this one where the book is very personal and isn't necessarily about making universal moral proclamations.
> isn't necessarily about making universal moral proclamations
Not the guy you're replying to but you must be moronic homosexuals. Throughout the book Dazai makes moral proclamations. In fact, his entire worldview is a series of shallow moral condemnations about the society he's 'fallen' into and the state of the world more generally. What makes him different is that, despite his insistence on making some sort of value judgement about the world, he doesn't care to delve any deeper into the issue at all. He stays in this shallow, murky pool of self-wallowing.
This sums up Dazai's entire shtick. From the get go he proclaims everything meaningless and futile, but it kneecaps him because he nonetheless has a book to write about himself wandering through said world. The result is garbage. Now compare this very carefully to someone like Woolf who recognized her mental illness and more importantly, recognized how her illness PREVENTED her from truly 'accessing' or being 'apart of' the world she was in. The resulting gulf was where her writing shined - it was making sense of that gulf where her books shone. "To the Lighthouse" is a perfect example.
Dazai was just a very poor writer and had no sense whatsoever of what made for good literature. This guy is right
It quite literally is a bloated suicide note with no artistic merit whatsoever. I've read more engaging manifestos from school shooters kek.
He makes those sorts of statements, yes, but they are not meant to be taken at face value; they are the narrator's thoughts being depicted as they arise, they're not being passed off as dispassionately stated philosophical truths. Anything he says about the world at large is predicated upon the way the world reacts to him, specifically the tension between how he sees himself and how the world sees him.
He is disgusted with people only when they fail to see through him, when they buy what he's selling and obediently decline to pay attention to the man behind the curtain (and even in these cases he ultimately tends to pity their weakness more than he does his own). When they see him, he is consumed by terror. This dynamic is acknowledged and discussed at length, and he makes clear the individual and personal nature of his malady, makes clear that he knows there is a limit to the extent to which other people can be said to share his flaws.
Again, I really get the impression that you are a person who has a particular reaction to what you perceive as arrogant, unreflecting nihilism. I understand that reaction and I feel the same way for the most part, but I think any rigorous and clearsighted analysis will show that No Longer Human cannot fairly be called an example of that sort of lazy nihilism.
Your point about Woolf is interesting, I haven't read much of her stuff but I like her and your description makes me want to read more. I'm not saying NLH is earth-shatteringly great or anything or that other books don't surpass it in various ways, just trying to get people to take a slightly more detailed view of it beyond the sub-80 IQ one-line assessments of books/authors that are the norm here.
>He makes those sorts of statements, yes, but they are not meant to be taken at face value; they are the narrator's thoughts being depicted as they arise, they're not being passed off as dispassionately stated philosophical truths.
I think we have to disagree. I don't know how you can determine the meaningful difference in the text itself. Especially when he says things like this:
>"I came to hold, almost as a philosophical conviction, the belief: What is society but an individual?"
>What is the meaning of life? That was all - a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.
That's Woolf. Notice the difference. She doesn't offer any half-assed maxim, instead she only carefully reflects on what the question means to HER, or rather, how she's unable to answer the question.
By comparison, Dazai approaches the same or similarly themed question but insists on an all-too simple answer. Life is meaningless; "everything passes", he says at one point. Life is a game of 'insincerity' he says at another; everybody being fake and wearing a mask. He tries to capture the world in these all-too simple but nonetheless totalising one-liners that tell us nothing about his own suffering nor about the world he feels detached from. Woolf, on the other hand, focuses her gaze on the separation itself; and that's where her prose shines. That's why she masters introspection in a way Dazai could never come close to.
It's why Dazai is incapable of marking any significant difference between events in his life. Drug abuse; his wife being raped; he approaches them all with the same disinterested tone, because he's already decided from the outset that it's all meaningless.
I should dedicate a day or something to collating my various criticisms, but hopefully you get the gist.
You can determine the difference by comparing different statements made by the narrator on different occasions. Here he is a few paragraphs after your quote:
>That is what I was—a toad. It was not a question of whether or not society tolerated me, whether or not it ostracized me. I was an animal lower than a dog, lower than a cat. A toad. I sluggishly moved— that's all.
And not long after that:
>I gradually came to relax my vigilance towards the world. I came to think that it was not such a dreadful place.
And at the end of that passage:
>I felt pity and contempt for the self which until yesterday had accepted such hypothetical situations as eminently factual scientific truths and was terrified by them. This shows the degree to which I had bit by bit arrived at a knowledge of the real nature of what is called the world.
After a cursory look through the following sections, another part that stands out is the game of "tragic and comic nouns" in which many sweeping, dismissive statements are made, but all undercut by the subsequent dismissal of the game itself. There are occasions where significantly positive assessments (or at least positive relative to his own self-assessment) are made even of characters such as Flatfish and Horiki. These are a few examples among many which demonstrate the ambiguity of his feelings about the world.
As for "everything passes", I'm not so sure that this can be directly read as stating that life is meaningless. The full quote is:
>Everything passes.
That is the one and only thing I have thought resembled a truth in the society of human beings where I have dwelled up to now as in a burning hell.
Things to note: he says *I have thought* that it *resembles* a truth, not that it *is* a truth, and that *I have dwelled* in society *as* in a burning hell, not that it *is* a hell; the statement that things pass is not necessarily a denial that they have meaning; the statement is in fact true, and occupies a higher modality of truth in a certain sense than any other statement, which is not the same thing as saying it is the most important statement one can make; this is not just being said "at one point" it is at the very end of the notebooks, when everything has indeed passed for him and he is in a state of total moribundity; in light of that situation, it is more to be seen as a statement of his own final relief and release than as a pronouncement of doom upon the world.
There is also the salient point that the true "I" of the book is the writer who writes the epilogue and prologue, a device which places the entire thing in a highly detached frame of reference that reflects a proper sense of the scale of his personal struggles.
Basically I'm just trying to suggest that it needs to be looked at as a narrative whole from which those statements are not meant to be plucked out without context and pointed to as summations of what the book is "trying to say".
>it's very clearly the thing which finally ends up breaking him for good
Come on my guy, that isn't obvious anywhere. In fact, the rape appears to be just one more hiccup in his tragic life. He even says this after witnessing it,
>"This is just another aspect of the behavior of human beings. There's nothing to be surprised at."
The implication here quite clearly being, 'this is just another bad thing that's befallen me like all the others'. Like his failed double suicide; substance abuse; sexual abuse. The ennui here is revolting.
>...and occupies a higher modality of truth in a certain sense than any other statement,
Exactly, and that's why it fails in my estimation. He begins with a rudimentary reflection, but then abandons it so soon after for something grander and more totalising. That’s when he sets about groping for a universal law by which to adorn his miserable world. It prevents him from meaningfully carrying through the reflection he had begun in the way someone like Woolf succeeds in doing, for example.
To put it more crudely: his search for 'philosophical convictions' about the world creates a distance incongruous with the story’s format as a series of journal entries detailing a ‘grinning monkey’s’ life.
>There is also the salient point that the true "I" of the book is the writer who writes the epilogue and prologue, a device which places the entire thing in a highly detached frame of reference that reflects a proper sense of the scale of his personal struggles.
This isn’t correct. There are two ‘I’s’ that Dazai wants us to be aware of - the I that is disengaged from Yozo’s life, and Yozo himself. The role of the epilogue and prologue is to illuminate the stark difference in mindset between the unnamed person who happens upon Yozo’s journal, and Yozo himself, whose ramblings form the bulk of the story. This is made obvious where the first words in the Epilogue are,
>”I never personally met the madman who wrote these notebooks”
Again, this would’ve worked if Yozo’s entries were as personal and introspective as you seem to think they are, but I find the inverse is the case, which is why Dazai’s narrative strategy doesn’t quite work in the end.
Now, If Yozo had stuck to the introspection without shifting into the ‘higher modality’ train of thought, as you term it, I would’ve been more impressed. But the arrogance of him thinking he can rise above his subjectivity to diagnose a world that’s made a victim out of HIM (despite him being equally c**ty to people around him) leaves a sour taste in my mouth. I want to compare one more time to the Woolf quote in my previous reply: She also presents a broad, totalising question, but she doesn’t deign to answer it in that vein. Instead we get profound introspection on merely what life can mean to HER.
That remark is his immediate reaction in that moment. There are many, many other reactions; everything that happens after that point is colored by that incident, never mind the fact that he is writing the whole account of his life after that happened, so it informs his reflection on everything. One quote out of many:
>This was truly the decisive incident of my life.
See? Do you see that your way of looking at this is perhaps a bit selective and based on trying to retroactively support a conclusion you've formed in advance? I'll admit that I give him the benefit of the doubt at times, so I'm not entirely innocent on that front either, but I am not ignoring massive portions of the narrative in order to focus in on a few out-of-context statements.
When I talk about the higher modality I don't mean that it's objectively true as opposed to a personal reflection; I mean that it's the only statement that necessarily retains its truth across time, which is why it makes so much sense to place it at the end. That is also the sense in which the frame narrative is more real, it exists before and after the notebooks, it depicts a world beyond him and shows how differently things are interpreted by different individuals. Of course the notebooks are the main point of the book but the frame has precedence over it in this temporal sense, and takes on a privileged role in the way it is allowed to contextualize and comment upon the notebooks. Basically it provides the objectivity which the main narrative lacks, and therefore serves to acknowledge that lack. We can even compare it to a similar frame narrative in a similar book, Heart of Darkness. In that book, the story is absolutely meant as a comment upon and condemnation of society, whereas in No Longer Human the frame narrative character is not somehow deeply disillusioned about his life in light of the revelations of the notebooks, he merely recognizes the disturbing nature of the individual in question and his particular situation. (cont.)
This (
) is also the way in which Dazai is separate from Yozo , even though Yozo is "him" to some extent: Dazai both occupies his alter ego and looks at him from an outside perspective. And the circumstances absolutely do not indicate that he intended the book as a manifesto of his conclusions about the world, they indicate only that it was a record of his experience. When he searches for universal laws, it is a momentary coping mechanism which is just as often repudiated by contradiction, self-questioning, guilt, etc., a pattern which strongly argues against the claim that such declarations of "law" are meant as a direct communication of something the author believes to be true. In fact, the "everything passes" part at the end, in stating that to be "the only thing [he had] thought resembled a truth", unequivocally wipes the slate clean of any other statement which might have been taken as universal. It is all part of portraying an individual - hence the focus on the photographs, the "ghost portraits".
To add to my previous reply regarding the rape: also notice how he's diagnosed the species in a single, asinine remark. "This is just people. Nothing new here." It belies a deadly concoction of ignorance and pride, as though no further scrutiny or reflection were needed.
Also I would very much contest your point that his wife being raped is something which he approaches disinterestedly, it's very clearly the thing which finally ends up breaking him for good, and any sense that it doesn't effect a meaningful change in him is probably more due to the fact that he foreshadowed it in advance and did not attempt to fully immerse the reader in his state of mind at the time. But the paragraph about his happy married life gives enough of a sense of it to understand the significance of the change when it happens.
Hello again (from the thread a few days ago). I think you're on the ball.
>filtered by not recognizing the frame narrative
I'd agree with you that To The Lighthouse is the superior novel but it isn't directly comparable to No Longer Human (you need to read more). They both play to empathy in entirely different ways (Woolf puts you inside her characters through stream of consciousness whereas Dazai outs you as a person reading someone's journals). Simple as. The fact you impress personal moral judgments as if they reflect on the novel proves Dazai was successful in what he set out to do and that you're filtered because:
>People end up judging book as if it were Oba as if he were the [Dazai]
without considering the fact they're doing what they're intended to be doing. I won't directly call you a moron but I'll tell you that your take is shallow and it underscores the fact you were filtered.
Bruh you were hard filtered if you think Yozo isn't impressing his own value judgements on the world around him throughout his journal entries. You're weird distinction between Oba and Dazai is flimsy as hell and doesn't hold water considering the extra-textual circumstances in which Dazai wrote this. Pot, meet kettle. I can only surmise you're just as insufferable a c**t as Yozo.
>Seethe, virgin.
Why is this book getting you so irrationally angry lol
That's just the translator making up shit to appeal to western postwar orientalism bro. Had nothing to do with Japanese society. All of the shit in it is much mimed/transplanted Western stuff of the time anyway.
Anyway I still agree with you because literature isn't so simple and all or nothing like that. It should be not be restricted to simple yay or nay evaluation but left tolerantly on its own as an experience.
IQfy is getting filtered by Dazai. It's really over for you guys lol.
They hated him because he spit facts.
Thanks, that's all I needed to hear. Removed it from backlog. I should've known it was another IQfy incel crap like Pessoa, Hamsun, Nietzsche, etc
this
I would say my life is actually much less worthy of publication, due to my low status of birth and inability to have sex.
reddit moment
I thought some sections were well written and there were some memorable moments and scenes. The general theme and the descriptions of the protagonist do feel like they would illicit a “literally me!” response from some readers that would frequent this board. Particularly the concepts of alienation, understanding how others work mechanically without understanding how they function beyond that so that Yozo is able to conjure up the sort of reactions and perceptions that he’s seeking from other people but doing so in a way that betrays his own dignity time and time again as he conceals his true self. I think being exposed to a character like this would allow for some readers to recognize elements of their own personality reflected in the story or if they themselves are so fortunate as to not be afflicted with these defects then they can perhaps better understand others in their personal life that do demonstrate similar behaviors and attitudes. In the end my biggest gripe with the book was that at times it felt like a real effort to get through and it lacked a certain richness and depth overall beyond the central theme that Yozo contends with throughout the book. In the end it felt excessively whiny but that makes sense given who the author was.
It causes incels to seethe uncontrollably so it's probably good
Incels love this book.
It would be illogical for them to love this book. Yozo smashes and dashes multiple women not only without any effort whatsoever but also while actively sabotaging himself in the process.
He basically hate fricks women, or at the very least indifferently. He's the incel's Zeus.
He would probably be an incel if he was born in the modern era though.
DUDE LITERALLY DROWNED HIMSELF WITH A BABE SO GOES TO SHOW WHAT YOU KNOW
I don’t think thatd be the case, Id actually venture to say that itd be interesting to see a modern novel that addresses a similar archetype just in the setting of our day and age.
I’ve known individuals who sincerely struggle to meaningfully connect with other people on a genuine level but know exactly how to push the right buttons to get laughs, garner intrigue, and gain admiration from others, even girls. These girls of course can be described as somewhat mid, but tend to become fascinated by such types of men in spite of the fact that these guys are hopelessly incapable of finding meaning broadly speaking or any reason to continue entertaining their femme orbiters other than for stringing them along to get things that they need to keep chugging along. One example I have is this girl that would literally drive 30 minutes out of her way to help this guy purchase a gift for his father on Fathers Day when he couldn’t be bothered to find the motivation to do it himself, pay for meals when the occasion isn’t a date, and, no exaggeration here, drunkenly and sloppily deepthroat the guy for over an hour while he's laid out on her couch seeping his good for nothing ass sweat into the nice towel that she so conscientiously placed beneath him, just for the honor to have him talk at her and make her laugh at his scattered musings and observations for a little bit. I would happen to know such an individual very well indeed.
People not liking this book causes incels to seethe***
It’s not amazing but it was an emotional book for me at least.
IQfy likes Mishima because he fricked men and doesn't like Dazai because he fricked women. That's all you need to know.
Closer to the truth to say that IQfy is full of fascists allergic to any portrayal of a weak or vulnerable man. Which is what we see with all the flailing on this thread.
It makes you feel something authentically and that's worth something in itself.
a girl recommend this to me.
Worst book I've read. Not that it is necessarily bad it just has no point unlike something similar like Welcome to the NHK.
The only cool part of the book is that 1. it's short. and 2. there is a part where the protag describes depression as a pale ghost rather than a black void. and maybe 3. going home after getting drunk and sleeping on your wife's breasts
You thinking NHK is similar to this really shows your understanding of this novel and literature in general
I read this book but it was a copy with a terrible translation. Enjoyed it but couldn't even begin to decipher more than a few lines.
I didn't find it as hard hitting as everyone claimed it would be but good read all things considered.
It was alright.
>I AM LE.....DEPRESSED AND THAT MAKE ME DEEP...
Yeah, pretty much.
Terrible book I agree with the others here
Were you filtered.
Nothing to be filtered by kek, let's be honest here.
IQfy got filtered by Dazai. You heard it here first, bros.