Listen: if everyone must suffer, in order
to buy eternal harmony with their suffering, pray tell me what have children
got to do with it? It’s quite incomprehensible why they should have
to suffer, and why they should buy harmony with their suffering.
(See Important Quotations Explained)
Summary—Chapter 1: A Betrothal
Back at Madame Khokhlakov’s house, Alyosha discovers that
Katerina has come down with a fever, apparently due to her intense humiliation
over Dmitri’s decision to leave her. Alyosha talks with Lise and
tells her about his failure to convince the captain to take Katerina’s
money. Deeply moved by Alyosha’s gentle wisdom, Lise suddenly admits
that her love letter was sincere. Alyosha also loves Lise, and the
two young people begin to plan their marriage. Alyosha also confesses
that he deceived Lise about the letter. He refused to give it back
to her, not because he did not have it with him, as he claimed,
but because it was too important to him to give up.
As Alyosha leaves, Madame Khokhlakov stops him. She has
listened in on his conversation with Lise, and says that she is
bitterly unhappy at the thought of his marriage to Lise. Madame
Khokhlakov implies that Lise has been increasingly unreliable and
difficult lately. When the daughter marries, she says,
the mother has nothing to look forward to but death. Alyosha tries
to calm her by telling her that the marriage will not take place
for at least another year and a half, but when she presses him to
show her Lise’s letter, he refuses outright.
Summary—Chapter 2: Smerdyakov with a Guitar
Alyosha thinks about Dmitri’s violent and passionate behavior,
and decides to try to help his brother rather than return to Zosima’s
bedside in the monastery as he longs to do. Alyosha notes that Dmitri seems
to be avoiding him, so Alyosha decides to stake out the gazebo that
he knows Dmitri often visits to watch for Grushenka. There, Alyosha
overhears Smerdyakov playing a guitar and singing a song for the
housekeeper’s daughter. Alyosha tentatively interrupts this
scene and asks Smerdyakov if he knows where Dmitri has gone. Smerdyakov
says that Dmitri has gone to meet Ivan at a restaurant.
Summary—Chapter 3: The Brothers Get Acquainted
When Alyosha arrives at the restaurant, he finds Ivan
sitting at a table alone. Ivan asks Alyosha to join him and says
he has begun to admire him and would like to get to know him better.
Alyosha is worried about what will happen to Fyodor Pavlovich and
Dmitri if Ivan leaves for Moscow, but Ivan firmly declares that
what happens to the others is not his responsibility. He says, in
fact, that it was Fyodor Pavlovich’s repulsiveness that caused him
to come to this restaurant in the first place, simply to escape.
Summary—Chapter 4: Rebellion
The two brothers begin to discuss questions of God’s existence
and the immortality of the soul. Ivan says that, in his heart, he
has not rejected God, but that at the same time he feels himself
unable to accept God or the world that God has created. Ivan says
that he can love humanity in the abstract, but that, when he meets
individual men and women, he finds it impossible to love them. Moreover,
he is deeply troubled by the injustice of suffering on Earth. He
asks Alyosha how a just God could permit the suffering of children,
creatures too young even to have sinned. He says that to love such
a God would be the equivalent of a tortured man choosing to love
his torturer. When Alyosha is troubled by Ivan’s position, Ivan
asks him if he could accept even a perfect world in which the perfection depended
on the suffering of an innocent creature. Alyosha reminds Ivan of
the sacrifice of Christ, and Ivan, insisting that he has not forgotten
Christ, recites a prose poem, called The Grand Inquisitor, that
he wrote some time ago.
Analysis—Book V: Pro and Contra, Chapters 1–4
Lise is portrayed as a character poised between the two
philosophical poles of the novel: the love represented by Alyosha
and the despair represented by Ivan. Lise’s gleefully mischievous
behavior in the early part of the novel is actually the early onset
of what finally becomes a wild, temperamental capriciousness. She
struggles to be happy, but, as is clear from her increasingly antagonistic
behavior toward her mother, she is beginning to distrust the authority
figures in her life and to feel frustrated with the shortcomings
of the world around her. She reacts to her inner turmoil with wild
mood swings and displays of extreme affection and extreme hatred.
In this way, Lise is linked to the “shriekers” described in Books
I and II, women who are so unable to cope with the horrors of the
world that they collapse into hysteria, and thus serve as symbols
of the despair that besets those who share the anguished doubt embodied
by Ivan. In this part of the novel, Lise seizes on Alyosha as a
possible source of salvation. But while she admires his blithe faith,
she is unable to share it, and she eventually succumbs to a petulant,
spiteful despair. Though this scene seems happy, the seeds of Lise’s
downfall are already apparent in the way that she rebels against
her mother, in the extremity of her emotional displays, and in the
way she oscillates between admitting and hiding her love for Alyosha.
