This was one of those chapters that I constantly had to stop and ask myself "how can someone write like this? How can the mind think of putting these sentences on paper?" Dostoevsky is on his own level in my eyes, I'm reading TBK for the second time in 2 months now 😂
When he says its ur brother coming .. that’s what gets me …if it was a figment of only his imagination how would he know it was Alyosha? Or could perhaps be both .. the devil within and an external entity ? Both tormenting him
One of my favorite passages from TBK. I find the detail and specificity in the description of the devil - particularly his social history, the exact nature of his being a once wealthy man but now reduced to cycling through his acquaintances - lends the devil just enough detail to seem real, but since we know he’s the result of brain fever, he crosses over into the literary equivalent of the uncanny valley. It makes the entire conversation so much more ominous; it makes you feel like the devil could be lurking behind the mustache any bourgeois acquaintance in your own life.
i just finished this book today, 2 weeks chipping at the old block during quarantine. when i read this scene i felt like i'd been hit by a blue-forked bolt of lighting! absolutely incredible, there was a kind of white noise in my room, a streak in the silence, which almost made me feel myself like i was being visited by a supernatural entity as i was reading it because i was so gripped and electrified. it was the knock-out blow so to speak because in the previous scene when he learns the truth from smerdyakov regarding the murder i genuinely was trembling a bit because i had slipped into Ivan's skin to to such a degree. (perhaps because I also am of the disposition to be afflicted by anxieties and paranoias about my own actions and the like, etc., and i empathised just purely.) also filled with revulsion and extreme curiosity in observing the verbal duel between the son and the bastard brother.
Came here from your reddit post in r/Nietzsche linking this video. I read that passage and thought the same exact thing! I knew I couldn’t have been the only one
Excellent breakdown. Would love to hear your thoughts on a story the Devil told Ivan. Of the man who walks a quadrillion miles. Why does (the atheist) wait and not follow the afterlife order to walk the quadrillion miles?
I think it ties in with dostoevsky's notion that suffering is the only way to be happy in life and that everyone needs to suffer in order to get into heaven. Basicallyhe thinks atheists don't humble themselves enough to suffer.
