Free Essay The Idiot

wardensdoor · Uploaded by **wardensdoor** on Jun 21, 2005

The Idiot is Dostoevsky's second novel. The book is a hybrid of biographical sketches and anecdotes of the writer. The protagonist, Prince Myshkin, bears traces of his creator in his suffering of epilepsy. Dostoevsky often deviates from the main plot and voices his perspectives on pain, suffering, capital punishment, and moral goodness.
The notion of suffering incessantly sifts through the novel as if true suffering plays a key role in purifying the protagonist and granting him the overriding power to the [evil] society in which he seeks to gain acceptance. However excruciating and painful it might be, physical suffering and bodily agony would distract the mind from spiritual suffering. That is, the physical aching deprives functioning of mental thinking. The worst suffering, as Prince Myshkin contemplates, are the knowledge and the inevitable truth of one's imminent death, the invincible parting of soul with the body. Being mindful of one's death would only perpetuate suffering. Readers should grip this idea and bear in mind.

Morally upright, magnanimous, forgiving, humble, loving, honest, virtuous and mindful of others needs, Prince Myshkin embodies all human virtue and goodness. He is almost like God, or perfecting to be like God. He is a man capable of an ideal. He is stuck and torn between the love of Aglaia and Natasya upon his return to Russia from medical treatment in Switzerland. Myshkin's self-stigmatizing, humble, and diffident element often agitated Aglaia whose love for him manifests to the full in her passionate recital of a poor knight poem. She shows desire to marry him despite the wonted taunting. She assures that Myshkin is more honorable than anybody is and nobody is worth his little finger let alone his heart and soul.

Out of volition and obligation, Myshkin believes he is responsible to rescue the vile, [evil] Natasya from her deranged mental state. The cause of his love for her was more than just the bewitching, demonical beauty: it is rather eagerness on Myshkin's part to be of service to his country after being abroad. He has long set an ideal and having faith in such ideal empowers him to give up his life blindly to it. Though Natasya is surprised at Myshkin's discerning words that she ought to be ashamed and that she is not what she pretends to be, she tortures herself by not falling in love with him lest to disgrace and ruin his life.

In her importunate letters to Aglaia, Natasya implored and coaxed her to marry Myshkin as she did not wish to besmirch him. But destiny plays a cruel joke on them. Myshkin bears such tender spot for the afflicted, disgraced women in Natasya. However pertinacious not to love him, Natasya acknowledges his irresistible impact on her and regards him as the first and only man she has met in her whole life that she has believed in as a sincere friend. When Aglaia accuses her being a manipulator, Natasya falls down on her knees and thwarts Myshkin from leaving, who then comforts her and agrees to marry her.

Many readers, myself included, would mull at the meaning of the title. It would be impossible to do Myshkin justice by abasing him as an idiot. A simpleton at best? Myshkin is looked upon as an idiot (from Greek meaning private and ignorant) for his not being compromised with the vanity, vices, [evilness], mendacity, and avarice of a vain society. Unyielding as he might be, it is almost like naivete that Myshkin always resolves to be courteous, honest, and trustful with everyone. Such naivete somehow gives way to philosophical outlook and idealism and thus ennobled him. Others harbor the effrontery to inveigle him, to launch a calumny against him in order to usurp his fortune. Maybe his ignorance of the vile and magnanimity for others' wrongdoings create in him an idiot (a private person).

The Idiot, as cumbersome and lengthy as it seems, is rather a simple novel in plot. Dostoevsky often deviates from the main plot to reflect (and to reiterate) his philosophy through the prince, somehow bears an overriding sense of mission in the society, if not the whole world. I have denounce some critics' portraying the story as some bitter love triangle, for Dostoevsky has no room for a melodrama. In an epic that evokes Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Dostoevsky seeks out the most ordinary characters whose ordinary tales (Madame Epanchins' imaginative troubles and whining, Ippolit's nightmares, General Ivolgin's delirious memories of his childhood encounter with Napoleon) lend a special note of verisimilitude in the lives of Russians.

Like Crime and Punishment, The Idiot is dim, melancholy, doleful, and somber though the Epanchins, Lebedyev, and General Ivolgin animated, lightened up with a tinge of comic relief. Myshkin's desire to cure Natasya of her madness only relapsed himself into insanity. The Idiot evokes in readers a sense of tenderness and sympathy for the protagonist whose unyielding righteousness impedes him from resolving his own plight.