The first modern antihero speaks from his hole in Petersburg, raging against reason, against progress, against the Crystal Palace of utopian socialism, against everything that would reduce human beings to piano keys playing a predetermined tune. Dostoevsky's unnamed narrator is spiteful, contradictory, and impossible to like, yet his monologue anticipates existentialism, psychoanalysis, and a century of alienated literature. The prose bites. This is where the modern psychological novel truly begins, in a voice that refuses to be rationalized away.