Notes from Underground- initial thoughts

I just finished reading Dostoevsky's "Notes from Underground" and found it to be a wonderfully vulgar piece of literature. It did not take me to long into the reading to realize that I myself am an Underground Man not unlike the narrator. I'm not much for reader-response criticism, but this book certainly calls for it. The narrator's self-centric anguish is my self-centric anguish, and his living out of books is certainly similar to my own (of course now days we have infinitely more things to distract us/inhance our fantasies). He is ultimately a man who has not learned self-control in any respect because that is something that is learned through social interaction. He doesn't know how to control his thoughts which are led by his emotions and they ruin him. It is raw uncontrolled anguish centered around the self and his lack of ability to control the circumstances around him to fit with his fantasy. He wants "the beautiful and lofty" and fails to realize that the novels he reads do not reflect the truth of the world but escape to a fascade of idealistic fantasy. and he places himself over others in order to criticize them from his idealistic high rise. You cannot criticize on the same footing.

Is the fate of all cynics? The fact that we have an overly developed sense of self and inflated ideology that has no room for reality to participate or influence it? Perhaps what is "high and lofty" must be made "low and meager". Perhaps we must find a way to live outside of ourselves instead of constantly criticizing from the inside.