Use of Narrative Voice and Language in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Crime & Punishment
The multiple devices that Dostoevsky adopts in Brothers are easier to notice after reading Crime & Punishment, from which they are more or less absent. The stylistic choices in C&P are more conventional and consistent-from start to finish, the novel’s tone remains relatively unchanged. Dostoevsky’s prose is often terse, spare, and direct; eschewing lyricism, Raskolnikov’s story unfolds quickly and fluidly, never stopping to listen to the sound of its own voice. The pacing is brisk, and emotions are concisely but convincingly evoked without the extensive use of figurative language. Dostoevsky writes from an unfettered third-person perspective with a keen sense of immediacy and a certain grittiness; his tone at once anticipates and avoids the overdone banality of modern detective-murder thrillers. The early description of Raskolnikov’s apartment perfectly captures this direct, factual, dirty-fingernails approach:
There were three old chairs, not quite in good repair; a painted table in the corner, on which lay several books and notebooks (from the mere fact that they were so covered with dust, one could see that no hand had touched them for a long time); and finally a big, clumsy sofa, whichâÂ?¦was now all ragged and served as Raskolnikov’s bed (28).
This passage exemplifies a number of C&P’s defining stylistic elements. It is an unobtrusive, third-person narration without flourishes or needless detail-it serves a specific purpose. The succinct adjectives-“old,” “ragged,” “clumsy”-clearly suggest that Raskolnikov’s life is one of disarray and decay, further implying that his faithlessness has led naturally to paralysis and a physical stagnation, of sorts. Indeed, much of the drama in C&P is set in similarly cramped, threadbare spaces-even the streets of St. Petersburg are depicted as chaotic and intense. And thus is Dostoevsky’s intent; through his simple, piercing style, he lets the texture of the story itself come through, using a clean tone to sustain a brooding tension throughout the narrative. C&P, though it reaches 550 pages, is beyond doubt a taut and linear novel. The power of its message is derived from the fact that it is unsullied by needless wordplay. Similes, in the few times they are employed, are kept curt; Raskolnikov retreats into solitude “like a turtle into its shell” (28), or trembles “like a leaf” (59).
Of course, such palpable urgency cannot be created through the use of straightforwardness alone; Dostoevsky utilizes certain literary devices to generate energy. Take, for example, Raskolnikov’s dream in Part One, in which he watches, as a child, the merciless slaughter of a weak mare. “Her hind legs give way, but then she jumps up and pulls, pulls with all the strength she has left, pulls this way and that, trying to move the cart; but six whips come at her from all sides” (58). Immediately noticeable is the sudden shift into the present tense, an initially jarring switch that makes the dream viscerally and ominously instant. This exigency-inherent, almost, to the use of the present tense-is brought to a frenetic boil by the repetition of the verb “pulls”; the passage gains an instinctual rawness. The mare struggles and tugs, even in the face of helplessness; the repeated word thrusts the full scope of the frightening dream on the reader. Ergo, Dostoevsky is highly capable of manipulating language to elevate meaning; any aberrations, strange usages, or seemingly out-of-place departures in style are done with a specific intention.
Doubt and panic are integral and pervasive sensations in C&P, as well, and Dostoevsky’s dialogue is crafted to extract and magnify the confusion and uncertainty of his characters. When Raskolnikov discovers that Porfiry Petrovich is investigating the murder, his inquisitive conversation with Razumikhin is phrased quite deliberately: “Ã?¯Ã?¿Ã?½He’s now in charge ofâÂ?¦this caseâÂ?¦well, this murderâÂ?¦the one you were talking about yesterday?'” (242). This bit of dialogue alone is structurally fascinating, and extraordinarily indicative of Raskolnikov’s mental state. He is unable to come to terms with his own crimes; what is at first merely a “case” becomes-after a pause with ellipses and a reluctant “well”-a “murder.” The ellipses themselves function as not only an excellent emulation of real-life conversational patterns, but as additional clues to Raskolnikov’s inner restlessness. He pauses three times: first, because he is unsure of what to call the crime; secondly, as a gentle admittance that it was a murder; and thirdly, out of an inwardly shocked disbelief that it was, in fact, a murder. One can easily understand and imagine these pauses coming from someone in Raskolnikov’s position; Dostoevsky and, of course, his translators, have an enormous attention to detail, and everything is done for a reason. These ellipses return, notably, directly after Raskolnikov’s confession at the close of Part Six; there is an unbroken line of them after Raskolnikov repeats his statement, simultaneously illustrating the passage of time before the epilogue and the catharsis that comes with his admission (531). There is, in all of Raskolnikov’s dialogue and monologue, a well-crafted sense of tiredness, world-weariness, and uncertainty.
The supporting cast’s discourse is equally revelatory; Razumikhin’s reaction in the aforementioned conversation about Porfiry, for instance, allows the reader to glean evidence of his thoughts. Razumikhin is typically assuring: “Ã?¯Ã?¿Ã?½And he’ll be very, very, very, very glad to meet you!'” he says about the investigator. “It’s all turned out quite mag-ni-fi-cently!” (242). Razumikhin’s speech is generally characterized by a comically hyperbolic enthusiasm. This is seen above in his excruciating use of “very”-four times-and in his hilarious division of “magnificently” into four exaggerated chunks. His well-intentioned conversations are the light-hearted antidote to Raskolnikov’s dismal introspection. There is, finally, a subtle but biting dramatic irony to what he says; later on, Porfiry is “very glad” to meet Raskolnikov, but not for the reasons that Razumikhin assumes. All of these elements, packed densely but easily into snippets of dialogue, provide for the continuing suspense of the novel; accumulating over the pages, these small narrative choices make for compelling characters, rich details, and an engrossing sense of place. Crime & Punishment was written to reward close reading.
At the most minute and microscopic level, Dostoevsky is to be commended for his diction. C&P’s direct style means that whenever an oddly poetic word or phrase is used, it sticks out, often in a haunting or ironic way. Through abandoning needlessly complex language as a whole, Dostoevsky has attained incredible results when he allows himself an occasional lyrical indulgence. Natasya’s reasoning about Raskolnikov’s hallucinations achieves on such a level: “Ã?¯Ã?¿Ã?½It’s the blood clamoring in you,'” she tells him. “Ã?¯Ã?¿Ã?½When it can’t get out and starts clotting up into these little clots, that’s when you start imagining things'” (117). The use of “clamoring”-assuming its Russian equivalent is as strange as the choice in English-is so unusual as to be instantly memorable. It is symbolic in its oddity; Raskolnikov’s strained way of life, the passion of his guilt and the confusion in his ideology, all point to a prickling, on-edge awareness that is somehow accurately summarized by “clamoring blood.”
This phrase is accented by what follows it. Natasya, after inadvertently saying something so profound, seems to reassert her stupidity in the next sentence, tumbling awkwardly and redundantly over the words “clotting” and “clots.” Still, this statement, while revealing her plainness, is also valuable as a symbol; Raskolnikov’s “blood”-his hyperconscious mind-cannot be freed from the burden of his murders, and he thus begins to “imagine things.” One might understandably consider such a meticulous analysis to be a mere matter of opinion, but the evidence for drawing these connections is certainly available in the text.
Having now such a strong understanding of what makes Crime & Punishment read the way it does, it is easy to see why The Brothers Karamazov is such a radically different approach to novel-writing. The core of these differences can be seen by comparing, quite simply, the first paragraphs of both works, each of which is representative of the novel’s style as a whole. C&P opens with a brusque, fact-based account of its hero: “At the beginning of July, during an extremely hot spell, towards evening, a young man left the closet he rented from tenants in S-y Lane, walked out to the street, and slowly, as if indecisively, headed for the K-n Bridge” (3). The entire paragraph is only a sentence long, but it concisely offers a time, a place, and an intriguing main character. Brothers, on the other hand, opens with a strongly opinionated and general account of Fyodor Pavlovich; it is slightly meandering, and too lengthy to be reproduced in full here.
[Fyodor Pavlovich] was a strange type, yet one rather frequently met with, precisely the type of man who is not only worthless and depraved but muddleheaded as well-one of those muddleheaded people who still handle their own little business deals quite skillfully, if nothing else. � Again I say it was not stupidity-most of these madcaps are rather clever and shrewd-but precisely muddleheadedness, even a special, national form of it (7).
Next to C&P, this passage appears downright whimsical; the opening paragraph as a whole is peppered with parenthetical thoughts and tangential asides, and it possesses a wry, humorously judgmental tone. Reading it for the first time, one is absolutely unsure of where the narrator is going; though the reader is given a character and even mention of a murder, the next move is impossible to predict. Indeed, it is exceptionally difficult to gauge the intentions of the curiously undefined narrator. One only gets the feeling that, like Fyodor Pavlovich, he has a certain “muddleheadedness.”
Dostoevsky has brilliantly included a short introduction from the “author” that unabashedly shows the reader a few of the narrative quirks to be expected. After listing a slew of questions he has about his own creative process, the narrator admits that “being at a loss to resolve these questions, I am resolved to leave them without any resolution” (4). Several things are stressed in this prefatory note; first, the narrator is openly acknowledging his uncertainty, both that the novel should be written in the first place and as to how to write it. Secondly, his blatant use of overly elaborate wordplay is explored; “resolve” is used three different times, in three different forms. Brothers is characterized by this informal, almost sardonic tone; its loping narrator takes joy in his self-referential, circuitous storytelling style. He is laid-back at best, perhaps even a bit slothful at worst: “I quite agree that [my introduction] is superfluous, but since it is already written, let it stand” (4).
The resulting tone, when applied to the events of the novel itself, leads to a kind of detachment, at times. Dostoevsky’s narrator is able to lighten the mood when the novel becomes too dark; he is similarly able to extract true emotion from otherwise dull scenes. All the while, of course, he tells the story with an almost giddy inventiveness, drenching the work with his colloquial flair and sometimes eschewing the rules of ordinary grammar. Translator Richard Pevear recognizes this in his own preface; he observes that the novel’s “narrative voice” sometimes lapses into “wandering syntax,” “incorrect compound modifiers,” “hedged assertions,” “fused clichÃ?©s,” and “mixed diction” (xv, xvi).
Comedy is frequently used by the narrator both to contrast the dark events and to give the sometimes jumbled novel a more cohesive feel. Mitya’s trial, for instance, is a matter of intense seriousness, the culmination of all the events that came before it; and yet, the narrator interjects humor when it is least expected. He hilariously characterizes the German doctor, exaggerating his word-hunting tendencies and his colorful stories: “Ã?¯Ã?¿Ã?½Oh, n-n-no! A pound, a pound-apples come in dozens, not poundsâÂ?¦no, there are many of them, and they are all small, and you put them in the mouth and cr-r-rackâÂ?¦!’ Ã?¯Ã?¿Ã?½Nuts?’ Ã?¯Ã?¿Ã?½Well, yes, nuts, that is what I am saying'” (674). The juxtaposition of these comic elements with the grave nature of the trial itself allows the reader to get a glimpse of relief, to briefly recollect the joy that characterizes other portions of the novel. Brothers is, after all, an ultimately joyous novel; despite the murder of Fyodor Pavlovich, Smerdyakov’s suicide, the death of Ilyusha, and Dmitri’s imprisonment, it still somehow attains the good-natured power of faithfulness in its conclusion. This is owed, at least in part, to the strange techniques of the narrator, and to his penchant for adding comedy where it may not seem to belong.
These eccentric strands of comic sensibility are what keep the novel sewn together. Without the narrator at its center, Brothers would run the risk of falling apart; the individual plights of Alyosha, Ivan, and Dmitri are simply too different to be woven together in a typical, third-person approach. The narrator, however, provides a stunning uniformity in texture, allowing the stories of the brothers to collide and mesh without the end result being an unfocused mess. There is confirmation of this unity everywhere, right down to the titles of the chapters. Whereas Crime & Punishment titles its books and chapters using only roman numerals, Brothers features elaborate and sometimes hilarious titles for each of its many subdivisions. Book One is sarcastically titled “A Nice Little Family,” thus setting a comedic standard from the start; in “The Preliminary Investigation,” we are treated to “Mitya’s Great Secret. Met With Hisses,” and “The Evidence of the Witnesses. The Wee One.” During the trial itself, chapters receive such amusingly long names as “Psychology at Full Steam. The Galloping Troika. The Finale of the Prosecutor’s Speech.” The narrator even plays with continuations of titles. Book Twelve, Chapter Eleven is “There Was No Money. There Was No Robbery”; it is immediately followed by Chapter Twelve, “âÂ?¦And There Was No Murder Either.” On a more serious note, Alyosha and Mitya both get simple, one-word book titles, while Ivan’s is named “Brother Ivan Fyodorovich”; this extension is in fitting with his more intellectual nature, and his tendency to self-aggrandize. One might be tempted to write off such titles as inane artifice or pedantry-but it is difficult to deny that, when viewed collectively, the titles humorously summarize the novel, tie together loose ends, and provide a creative and solid portrait of the work as a whole.
There are crucial points in the novel when the narrator steps back and another perspective becomes dominant. The two quintessential examples of this are Alyosha’s writings on Father Zosima in Book Six, and Ivan’s philosophical speeches in “The Grand Inquisitor.” In these sections, Dostoevsky takes advantage of his novel’s irregular format, allowing the unique tones of his characters to filter through. Even a cursory examination of “The Russian Monk” reveals it to be stylistically distant from the normal narrator: “All the while [Father Zosima] was speaking, I looked him straight in the face and suddenly felt the greatest trust in him, and, besides that, an extraordinary curiosity on my own part, for I sensed that he had some sort of special secret in his soul” (302). Such “soul-baring” is absent from, or even incongruent to, the narrator’s approach; he achieves such real characters by maintaining his distance. Here, however, Alyosha’s own words help to clarify the extent of his faith; he is positively gushing about Father Zosima. Dostoevsky’s choice to have Alyosha write about Zosima’s teachings helps to strengthen the connection that the reader feels between the two characters; with its stylized, plain religious language, it solidifies the parallel between Alyosha and active love in a way that the ordinary narrator could not do.
“The Grand Inquisitor” does much the same for Ivan; through exposing us so thoroughly to his way of speaking, the chapter also supplies a wealth of information about his philosophy and thought processes. “They will finally understand that freedom and earthly bread in plenty for everyone are inconceivable together,” he says of Earth’s people in his theories: “they will also be convinced that they are incapable of being free, because they are feeble, depraved, nonentities and rebels” (253). Ivan’s approach to language is starkly different than that of the narrator or Alyosha-he is direct, philosophical, intellectual. Even this short excerpt demonstrates his passion for justice, and his inability to accept a God who allows such suffering. Dostoevsky is thus very adept at using tone and language to exhibit the heart of his characters’ individual and dissimilar philosophies.
It is interesting to note that, structurally, Ivan’s “Pro and Contra” book directly precedes Alyosha’s “The Russian Monk.” This points to yet another concept that Dostoevsky has embraced in Brothers: structural juxtaposition. C&P’s linear style made such comparisons impossible, but Brothers is compiled more loosely, with focuses and plotlines shifting frequently, and Dostoevsky reaps the benefits of such a composition. Seating Alyosha’s loving collection of Zosima’s homilies directly next to the heated contents of “The Grand Inquisitor” has a startling comparative effect; the reader cannot help but recognize the drastic differences in the brothers’ ideas. The beginnings of Ivan’s eventual madness are subtly brought out in his philosophies when they are contrasted with Alyosha’s. Though Brothers may feel at times disorganized or disjointed, the effect is purposeful-this careful mixture of sensibilities is invaluable to understanding the dichotomies of its central characters.
One will not find it hard to distinguish, then, the abundance of differences between Crime & Punishment’s style and that of The Brothers Karamazov. The former is a clear-cut, no-frills novel that hits on a gut level through its precise use of language and dialogue. The latter is a decidedly nonlinear novel-fraught with the amusing oddities of its narrator-that uses a variety of devices and textures in order to coalesce the worldviews of its three title characters. Readers are mistaken if they identify one approach as “better” than the other; the novels, as a testament to their respective and opposing styles, both succeed admirably in their goals. Raskolnikov’s harrowing process of guilt and salvation benefits from the intense, simple perspective from which it is told; the differences between Vanya, Mitya, and Alyosha-“mind, body, and soul”-are all expertly characterized by the multiplicity of tones and moods that appear in Brothers.[2]
Mikhail Bakhtin famously asserted that The Brothers Karamazov was Dostoevsky’s most “polyphonic” novel-he is absolutely right. What some critics have lambasted as sloppiness or clumsiness is, in fact, the intentional retooling of language and tone to achieve a specific resonance. Those who are unable to see the value in Dostoevsky’s choices are apparently incapable of appreciating “muddleheadedness.” As Larissa Volokhonsky says in The New Yorker, “Ã?¯Ã?¿Ã?½this is how people speak. We mix metaphors, we stumble, we make mistakes.'” If “smoothed over” or consistently presented, The Brothers Karamazov would lose much of its charm, its humor, and the nuances in its wonderfully realized characters. There is something to be said, then, for remaining unpolished; it takes a certain dedication-and it defies modern perceptions of art-to strive for imperfection in one’s work. Dostoevsky, however, has done just that in his monumental final novel. It is exactly this underlying disjunction that propels the work; it is “precisely muddleheadedness” that makes The Brothers Karamazov such a beautifully complex and unrivaled achievement.
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[1] From “The Translation Wars,” by David Remnick, as published in The New Yorker’s November 7, 2005 issue.
[2] To clarify: this analysis operates under the assumption that the Pevear and Volokhonsky translations of Crime & Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov are accurate in their recreation of Dostoevsky’s original style and intent.
