David Rice’s Reviews > The Brothers Karamazov > Status Update

The narrator is largely assumed to be Dostoyevsky himself. The narrator is considered omniscient but is also incredibly biased towards Alyosha. The narrator also has weird opinions that he cannot keep from interjecting into the narrative and they don’t always move the plot.

Yeah, several lines like “His splendid estate lay on the outskirts of our little town…” made me wonder if he was part of the story. And while only a few chapters in I’m noticing some of the opinions percolating out that might have been what got him in trouble with the powers that be in that time such as commenting on Alyosha’s decision to enter the monastery he said “As soon as he reflected seriously he was convinced of the existence of God and immortality, and at once he instinctively said to himself: ‘I want to live for immortality, and I will accept no compromise.’ In the same way, if he had decided that God and immortality did not exist, he would have at once become an atheist and a socialist. For socialism is not merely the labour question, it is before all things the atheistic question, of the form taken by atheism today, the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to Heaven from earth, but to set up Heaven on earth.”