/lit/ - Literature

Was it autism?

I'm legitimately an Ivan. How do I keep from destroying myself?

>>21244917
>"Oh, Alyosha, I am not blaspheming! I understand, of course, what an upheaval of the universe it will be, when everything in heaven and earth blends in one hymn of praise and everything that lives and has lived cries aloud: ‘Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed.’ When the mother embraces the fiend who threw her child to the dogs, and all three cry aloud with tears, ‘Thou art just, O Lord!’ then, of course, the crown of knowledge will be reached and all will be made clear. But what pulls me up here is that I can't accept that harmony. And while I am on earth, I make haste to take my own measures. You see, Alyosha, perhaps it really may happen that if I live to that moment, or rise again to see it, I, too, perhaps, may cry aloud with the rest, looking at the mother embracing the child's torturer, ‘Thou art just, O Lord!’ but I don't want to cry aloud then. While there is still time, I hasten to protect myself, and so I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It's not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its stinking outhouse, with its unexpiated tears to ‘dear, kind God’! It's not worth it, because those tears are unatoned for. They must be atoned for, or there can be no harmony. But how? How are you going to atone for them? Is it possible? By their being avenged? But what do I care for avenging them? What do I care for a hell for oppressors? What good can hell do, since those children have already been tortured? And what becomes of harmony, if there is hell? I want to forgive. I want to embrace. I don't want more suffering. And if the sufferings of children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price. I don't want the mother to embrace the oppressor who threw her son to the dogs! She dare not forgive him! Let her forgive him for herself, if she will, let her forgive the torturer for the immeasurable suffering of her mother's heart. But the sufferings of her tortured child she has no right to forgive; she dare not forgive the torturer, even if the child were to forgive him! And if that is so, if they dare not forgive, what becomes of harmony? Is there in the whole world a being who would have the right to forgive and could forgive? I don't want harmony. From love for humanity I don't want it. I would rather be left with the unavenged suffering. I would rather remain with my unavenged suffering and unsatisfied indignation, even if I were wrong. Besides, too high a price is asked for harmony; it's beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It's not God that I don't accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return Him the ticket.”

Is the Devil really in the room with Ivan or was it a dream?
General discussion of Ivan and his conversations with the Devil.

How many characters do you think should be the maximum any one book or series has?
Is it fine to have a main cast and a secondary cast? How much should the reader be expected to remember?

>>14064487
Dmitri is accurate, Alyosha looks like he has a stick up his ass (which he does have for half the book) but Ivan looks like some mook of a 19th century banker or something with that handlebar mustache. Would have thought he would have looked something more like this

>B-b-but that would be r-rebellion Ivan Fyodorovich!

>Shut the fuck up Alyosha you spineless cuck. Your beloved Zosima literally (literally) shat his pants when he died like the bitch he was, and your death, and all of our deaths, shall be no better. Your faith, invariably based on the suffering of others, is puerile, and what is even worse, juvenile. When I was half your age I already came up with the parable of the unbelieving man and surpassed it. The story of the Grand Inquisitor, the fifth chapter of Book V: Pro and Contra of The Brothers Karamazov (TM) by Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, was no more than an uncompleted and discarded sketch, a thought experiment. There is only one thing to be done: were I to meet our Creator above after my death, I would simply return the ticket.

Who was in the wrong here?