In Dreams Begins Responsibility

Pages read today: 115 for Meredith, 46 for Ilya

I'm so close now to the end of Karamazov, and the story's clicking along very swiftly indeed.  When he wants to be, Dostoevsky is quite thrilling.  Supposedly he studied the stories of Charles Dickens extensively, but Dostoevsky is definitely more into a flagrantly philosophical kind of storytelling than Dickens ever was. One could compare the section I just finished, in which Ivan Karamazov dreams of being visited by the Devil to, say, Dickens's A Christmas Carol (which I reread back in December, actually), and there are some similarities, but the differences are profuse.  Difference number one is the basic nature of the conversation: where Scrooge submits to his supernatural lessons very quickly, Ivan's visit is much more of a debate, even a struggle.  He's an atheist and he believes, or wants to believe, that the Devil is a figment of his subconscious; which he can hardly be wrong about since at the end of the chapter he wakes up.  But is he (the Devil, that is, the figment) something else as well?

The back cover advertises the primary plot of the novel as the story of the four brothers who "become involved in the brutal murder of their own father."  Best not to give the summaries of advertising hacks too much credit, as in fact the murder takes place more than halfway through the book.  A slow boil, to be sure, and Dostoevsky makes it even slower in some ways by, once the murder is committed, jumping forward in time so that we the reader are separated from the chain of the immediate consequences, the chain we were so involved in beforfe; and even by jumping sideways to a subplot which barely even existed in the novel before the murder took place.  It's a peculiar and sometimes frustrating technique.

Speaking both of dreams and of diverging from the primary points of interest: Dmitri Karamazov, the suspected murderer, has a curious dream in the hours shortly after his arrest and initial interrogation, and the dream evokes in him some kind of compassionate, humanity-loving response, and since then we've only seen Dmitri through the narratives and eyes of others. Boo. It's unclear, therefore, whether the effect the dream produced has been lasting, though the speeches that we "hear" Dmitri make are occasionally laced with references to the dream. I suppose I'm interested in the story of what we might call Dmitri's moral resurrection.  Redemption is a compelling topic for a story, which is a little strange because virtue so rarely is.

I ended tonight's reading on a pretty exciting cliffhanger. Therefore I'm going to bed that tomorrow may come all the sooner, and I can get back to the book.

Toodles!