Literature and Human Equality

Chapter 7: Quixotism in The Brothers Karamazov

7 Quixotism in The Brothers Karamazov In the tradition of Don Quixote, Dmitri Karamazov imagines himself a hero of romance, singled out by and for the extraordinary; but in this case a reader may not be able to know a giant from a windmill. Equality as a Literary Principle If, as M. M. Bakhtin argues, the hero of a novel cannot be “a clerk, a landowner, a merchant, a fiancé, a jealous lover, a father,” and nothing more,1 in the person of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov we meet a landowner who “hardly ever lived on his own estate” (7), a businessman who pays no attention to his taverns, a father who more or less forgot the existence of his sons and stands as a kind of antithesis of fatherhood as such, and a possessive lover who does not in fact possess the woman of his affections and probably never could. Neither, however, does The Brothers Karamazov itself slot into existing categories. Whether the author’s genius was just too original to fit a model or his interest in boundary conditions extended even to boundaries of a literary kind, the fact is that The Brothers Karamazov blurs the lines that set off one literary domain from another. It redraws the map of literature; or imagines one where the continents haven’t yet drifted apart. In view of its strongly dramatic character, even cataloging The Brothers Karamazov as a novel, the most open and least defined of literary forms, is somehow misleading. Joseph Andrews is bewilderingly classified by its author as a “comic epic-poem in prose.”2 The Brothers Karamazov might be termed a drama in prose, a drama both comic and tragic. It is of course strictly impossible for narrative to become drama, inasmuch as stage action is not related to the audience but realized in its presence. This impossibility does not daunt an author unwilling to sacrifice either the immediacy of drama or the unlimited range of narrative. Parallel lines do meet, more or less, in The Brothers Karamazov. The elementary distinction between drama and narrative loses much of its force in a work where by far the greater part of the telling is done di109 rectly by the characters themselves—the only description of the murder comes from the killer—and where the narration is hedged with disclaimers as if to keep it from intervening too positively between the reader and events. Such narration as there is, moreover, is deeply infiltrated by the direct speech of the characters. The novel opens conventionally enough, with information about the brothers’ childhood —all were abandoned by their father and taken in by others, like the exposed infants of romance—but not until the scandal scene in the elder’s cell do we learn of current affairs in the Karamazov family, and then not through narration but direct speech. So knotted and tense is the situation that emerges that it could work itself out in a dozen ways.3 Much as a character might be endowed with a surplus of potential, the conflict in the Karamazov household is of such intensity that it could drive different novels. We first learn of Dmitri’s rivalry with his father, and his disloyalty to his betrothed, in the heat of dialogue. The foreword to The Brothers Karamazov identifies Alyosha as the hero, and it is true that readers enter into a special bond with Alyosha in the sense that we go through the tale in a state of half-perception resembling his own. When Alyosha voices astonishment at Rakitin’s prediction of a crime in his household, we may be struck with his lack of perception, but until a moment before we ourselves didn’t even know what was going on in that household. Somehow we had gotten several chapters into this great novel before stumbling on the information that father and eldest son happen to be colliding over a certain woman, and two brothers are potentially in conflict over another. When Dmitri makes his passionate confession to Alyosha, neither Alyosha nor the reader knows that he has not in fact told all. No more than Alyosha do we ourselves know what Dmitri means by striking himself on the chest “as though [his] dishonor was lying and being kept precisely there” (156). Alyosha never considers that Smerdyakov might actually be his brother, and indeed Smerdyakov barely enters his field of consciousness, but at the same time readers never really hear from Smerdyakov in the way...