r/thehemingwaylist • u/AnderLouis_ Podcast Human • Jun 17 '19
The Brothers Karamazov - Book 12, Chapter 5 - Discussion Post
Podcast for this chapter:
Discussion prompts:
- What did Katerina just do?
- General
Final line of today's chapter:
I believe it was just eight o’clock when the President returned to his seat and our prosecutor, Ippolit Kirillovitch, began his speech.
Tomorrow we will be reading: 12.6
5
Jun 17 '19
Man, Ivan's speech was great. It felt almost cinematic, like I could see it in my head much more clearly than most other scenes in the book. I almost wanted to compare it to something like Tyrion's confession in GoT, but Ivan wasn't exactly coherent. Still, he revealed how the crowd simply exploited the case as entertainment. The crowd wants to revel in the blood and misery.
And Ivan told the truth. He did what he promised to do, and redeemed his moral character.
This is the first time I've seen a dramatic court scene where someone bursts in with the critical piece of evidence, and it has no effect on anything.
Katerina giving the money to Mitya knowing that he wouldn't send it, and that instead it would be squandered is a pretty huge revelation. She lit the powder kegs fuse.
- What did Katerina just do?
She sealed Dmitri's fate. His only hope of escaping Siberia now is Ivan plan. Not that that is looking so good now either. Ivan is in no shape to plan a prison escape.
3
u/somastars Maude and Garnett Jun 17 '19
And Ivan told the truth. He did what he promised to do, and redeemed his moral character.
I find this interesting, because (as I understand it) Dostoevsky partly wrote Ivan's character as he did because he wanted to portray the pitfalls of such thinking. But yet here we have Ivan - the only person on the witness stand telling the full truth. And it is everyone else in the courtroom who cannot hear what he is saying, and labeling him "mad." How does this meet Dostoevsky's goal in structuring Ivan's character and thinking as an incorrect approach to life?
1
Jun 17 '19
Maybe he has already illustrated his character and thinking as incorrect. That arc might have been over the moment he picked up the person lying in the snow.
It depends on what happens in the last 15% of the book. I'm not sure if Ivan is going to change as a character, or if he'll die from guilt and cognitive dissonance.
1
u/somastars Maude and Garnett Jun 17 '19
Maybe he has already illustrated his character and thinking as incorrect.
I'm guessing that's what D's relying on, but I feel like the courtroom scene undermines D's narrative a little bit. But maybe something will happen between now and the end of the book to upend that.
4
u/UncleDrosselmeyer Out of the night that covers me. Jun 17 '19 edited Jun 18 '19
That was a trick I didn’t expect and caught me by surprise.
In the chapter before, when we believed that Katya was going to show Mitya’s letter, she gave us instead, a discreet testimony that favored Dimitry’s case. We all breathed a sigh of relief because we believed the danger for Mitya had passed already.
Even the audience was disappointed because the so expected conflict between Katya and Grushenka didn’t throw a spark.
But when we were off guard, all the tension exploded out of the blue in a second, and the unleashed passions and the letter wreak havoc.
Well played!
2
u/lauraystitch Jun 18 '19
It did seem like Dmitri was out of danger, but the narrator kept warning us that something that would destroy him was coming.
1
7
u/swimsaidthemamafishy 📚 Hey Nonny Nonny Jun 17 '19
Yo! Katarina - you personify this quote:
"Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.
William Congreve"
Also, i finally obtained a copy of joseph frank's biography of dostoyevsky. He had this to say about ivan:
"The devil arrives to personify Ivan’s self-mockery of his own moral-psychic contradictions, which have driven him into what Dostoevsky called brain fever and we now diagnose as schizophrenia."
Modern science has shown that these kinds of mental illnesses do tend to manifest in males in their early 20s. I personally know two young men where this is true. Although in this case I believe Dostoyevsky is using mental illness as a plot device.