Be Careful About Simple Dualistic View – What "The Brothers Karamazov" Tells Us
Have you read The Brothers Karamazov? The Brothers Karamazov is a famous masterpiece by Dostoevsky. I've read it, and it taught me a lot. It's thought-provoking in many ways, especially for today's complex world.
Note: I've tried to be as spoiler-free as possible, but if you'd like to read that book from now on entirely spoiler-free, please be careful.
 |
| Photo by Yunus Gogce on Unsplash |
What is The Brothers Karamazov about?
The Brothers Karamazov is a literary work about God and humans. The story goes with a snobbish, philandering, and insane Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov and his three sons, Dmitri, Ivan, and Alexei. As Fyodor and Dmitri fight over a woman, an incident occurs. The readers can see each character's anguish over the incident.
Isn't it difficult to read The Brothers Karamazov? You may think so. Don't worry; probably it's not as difficult as you think. I'll tell you why.
The Brothers Karamazov is a very long story. Isn't it hard to read through?
No. It was far easier for me to read than I had expected. Yes, I admit I made a little effort to read Part I, but gradually I got excited about the story. Eventually, I felt I couldn't help reading it whenever I had time and read it through before I knew it.
Can you enjoy The Brothers Karamazov without knowledge of Christianity?
Yes. Maybe I could have enjoyed it from the Christian point of view if I were familiar with Christianity. Still, I immensely enjoyed The Brothers Karamazov despite not knowing about Christianity. Not only did I enjoy it, but also was I able to learn a lot from The Brothers Karamazov.
What you can learn from The Brothers Karamazov
The Brothers Karamazov told me that the world is so complex that we can't tell what is "right" or "wrong." We don't live in a world with simple dualism.
No one is purely good or wholly evil
There's no purely good person or utterly evil person. Everyone is good in some way and evil in another way, so we can't say someone is right or wrong. Almost all of the main characters have two sides in The Brothers Karamazov. They have ugly hearts, but at the same time, they have beauty inside.
Dmitri is a very example of a person with two extreme sides. He has two qualities that contradict each other. Dmitri drinks too much, is violent, always splurges, and is a flirt. At the same time, however, he is also trying to live a clean and righteous life. We can't say Dmitri is a beast just by looking at his wrong side, although he's far from holy as a whole.
We can interpret things any way we want
It's not only humans that have two faces. Multiple interpretations are possible for a single fact. There are countless ways of interpreting things, and finding only a single absolute way of interpretation is impossible. What matters is how we think.
People in the book must decide how to behave in many scenes. No one knows the answers, or perhaps there's no answer from the beginning. For example, we can find the world's complexity in the court scene at the end of the story. A prosecutor and an attorney argue in the court scene, and both sides' claims sound reasonable. One witness testifies in favor of the defendant, and one testifies against the defendant. No witness is lying, and it's difficult to determine whether their testimonies are correct. No one knows whether a defendant is guilty or innocent, so juries have to judge what is the truth. We, the readers, know all the scenes in The Brothers Karamazov, so the court scene makes us realize truths are different from facts.
Why is The Brothers Karamazov thought-provoking to us?
The Brothers Karamazov is thought-provoking to us living today because it reminds us that the world is so complex that we can't describe it with a simple dualistic point of view. There's no absolute answer. Each of we have to find a satisfactory solution.
At the story's beginning, there's a scene where people visit Father Zossima, the saintly old monk, from far and wide to ask for some advice or mystical help. People don't have any ideas of how to act, so they want Father Zossima to give answers to them.
We can say the same thing to us. We sometimes get afraid of deciding because we can't tell if the decision is right for us. So we want someone to show the answer. We want a simple explanation that we can easily understand. That's why we sometimes fall into a simple dualistic interpretation.
For example, someone says you should save money when you're young to have a prosperous future. Another one says that you should spend money when you're young because there are many things you can do only when you're young. Those two claims contradict each other, so we tend to think which is true. That's a simple dualistic way of thinking. Both claims are correct in some ways and wrong in other ways.
What we should think about in this example is that for what we should spend money on and for what we shouldn't. Maybe you shouldn't be reluctant to pay money to travel worldwide by hitchhiking if you want to. That's because you'll be able to experience a lot from it, and you might have enough energy and time if you get older. On the other hand, you don't want to pay for the drink too much. Instead, it'd be better to save money.
So what we need is to think on our own. The Brothers Karamazov also gives us hints about how to think on our own.
Conclusion
Since The Brothers Karamazov is a masterpiece (needless to say, though), it has much to offer to people like me who live in the 21st century and are still unfamiliar with the cultural background. The world we live in today is so complex that we can't have an absolute solution, so what The Brothers Karamazov tells us is essential to us.
