Philosophy Term Paper

1. What do we learn about Dmitri from his remarks about beauty, his dream of the "babe" and his reflections on the dream in his jailhouse conversation with Alyosha?

Ans. The phenomenon of splitness reveals itself repeatedly throughout his stories and novels. Splitness takes the form of spite and irrationality, a desire-to-please, yet a desire-not-to-please in the so-called Underground Man (or narrator) in Notes from the Underground. (Gibson 121).At best, Dostoevsky's major novels might be described as pre-evangelistic.

If a novelist were planning to offer a distinctively Christian answer, Dmitri Karamazov (in The Brothers Karamazov), Raskolnikov (in Crime and Punishment), and Stepan Verkhovensky (in Demons) are off-target. At the end of these three major novels all three characters are primed for conversion, but the best we are given falls under the category of hopeful hints. Boyce Gibson remarks, "In the Epilogue of Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov avoids the Christian formula [of conversion]…"23 Similarly, Richard Peace commented concerning Stepan Verkhovensky (in Demons) that his "final words…seem more in keeping with some vague theism of the [18]40s than with true Christianity." (Frank 43).

And what shall we say of Alyosha's "conversion"? Alyosha (having gone through some serious doubts) threw himself onto the earth to kiss it. "Something…unshakable, like that heavenly dome above him, was entering into his soul for all eternity" (The Brothers Karamazov, Part II, Book VII, chap 4). Alyosha articulates his experience by asserting, "Someone visited my soul at that moment." An ecstatic experience, yes. A Christian conversion? At best, an analyst must preserve an agnostic stance on the subject. It is certainly a vast cry from the "Jesus is Lord" experience of Saul of Tarsus in Acts 9. There is no real propositional content or identifiable theological referent to Alyosha's mystical encounter. Who is the "Someone" Alyosha encounters? (Richard 116)

Father Zosima is the lovable elder over the monastery (in The Brothers Karamazov) to which Alyosha is temporarily attached. Father Zosima says to his inquirer: "There is only one means of salvation…take yourself and make yourself responsible for all men's lives." For a Christian what is the "only…means of salvation"? Father Zosima's response is hardly deemed the orthodox answer to the question. It seems light years away from Acts 16:31. (Gibson 121).

Ivan the intellectual cannonades Alyosha with atheistic arguments. One of Alyosha's responses is to tell Ivan to "love life above everything. To this statement Ivan rejoins, "More than life's meaning?" Alyosha responds, "Half your work is done, Ivan, you love life; now you've only got to do the second half [presumably to find life's meaning] and you're saved." Those are strange statements to any evangelical Christian. (Ramm 15).

2. What use does Ivan make of stories he has collected about the sufferings of children? Does Ivan show anywhere in the novel that he does not really care about children?

Ans. From his other writings we know that in Notes from the Underground Dostoevsky had planned "to advocate Christian faith as a means of attaining moral freedom," yet "that swine of a [Russian] ...