The Brothers Karamazov: Sincere Narrator

Over the next few blogs, I will highlight a few reasons why I view TBK to be such a fine novel. This blog will focus on the narrator. As a writer, I am interested in narrative voices; when I read fiction, I pay close attention to narrators, to their perspectives, interpretations, idiosyncrasies, and so on.  Dostoevsky's narrator is a writer and his narration provides insight into the very question of what it means to write narrative, to record narrative events, to reduce people to narrative.
 

Impressionism, sunrise (Monet)

I'm not trying to be contemptuous but it is true that narrative cannot possibly wholly represent a person. That's why I prefer impressionistic writing, because it's phenomenological which seems consistent with experiencing reality.

Karamazov Family Photo?--Perhaps

 His hesitations, his equivocations, his prefaces--all demonstrate his feelings of inadequacy. For example, in the opening chapter, he admits that he doesn't fully understand why the aristocratic Adelaida Ivanovna Miusov would marry Fyodor who is so obviously beneath her class. The narrator says, "Precisely how it happened . . . I cannot begin to explain" (7) and then he makes a conjecture: "Perhaps she wanted to assert her feminine independence" (8). Throughout the novel, the narrator reinforces that he doesn't know everything. His modes of awareness range from  absolute confidence to utter doubt.   He is more than willing to accept multiple versions of events as the closing of chapter one reveals. Fyodor's first wife dies of either typhoid or starvation according to the two versions the narrator has heard and Fyodor reacts to this news in one of two ways: "the story goes that he ran down the street, lifting his hands to the sky and joyfully shouting . . . Others say that he wept and sobbed like a little child" (9). Finally, the narrator offers this disclaimer: "In most cases, people, even wicked people, are far more naive and simple-hearted than one generally assumes. And so are we" (9). Indeed. Dostoevsky reveals the complexity of character through his narrator's versions of events. I accept that Fyodor both celebrated and cried and that some people saw his former response and others saw the latter. The narrator is recounting historical events from memory and no memory or personal testimony can be authoritative except that it is true to the person who remembers.

 One last example of the narrator's explanation of his limitations in narrating authoritatively comes at the beginning of Book XII when he opens the trial scene. I like this passage because he is so transparent.

I hasten to emphasize the fact that I am far from esteeming myself capable of reporting all that took place at the trial in full detail, or even in the actual order of events. I imagine that to mention everything with full explanation would fill a volume, even a very large one. And so I trust I may not be reproached, for confining myself to what struck me. I may have selected as of most interest what was of secondary importance, and may have omitted the most prominent and essential details. But I see I shall do better not to apologize. I will do my best and the reader will see for himself that I have done all I can (656).

The narrator explains that for every event there are a multiplicity of viewpoints and interpretations. I see this as paralleling with the Gospels in the New Testament: the three synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) deal with the same events, but they offer unique views on those events. And in John 21: 25, John makes a similar statement to Dostoevsky's narrator: "Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written." Indeed, how can we possible represent the wholeness of an event?

During the trial, the narrator offers his interpretation of the trial lawyers' approach to the truth. Of the prosecutor, he says: "Ippolit Kirillovich, who had evidently chosen a strictly historical method of accounting, which is a favourite resort of all nervous orators who purposely seek a strict framework in order to restrain their own impatient zeal" (715). And of the defense lawyer, he explains: " He spoke somehow scatteredly at the beginning, as if without any system, snatching up facts at random, but in the end it all fell together" (725). The assessments of the lawyers signify the ways in which narrative is constructed and The Brothers Karamazov is replete with multiple modes of narrative construction.

Much more can be said about the narrator, but I want at least to emphasize that this, for me, this narrator is, perhaps, the paragon of narrators. (Although, Toni Morrison's narrator of Jazz is one of my most memorable and endeared narrators of fiction.)

In subsequent posts, I want to spend some time talking about the trial and about the dialectic between existentialism and Christianity.