A Novel in Nine Letters (1847)

What I find fun about this story is the sort of relationship Dostoevsky develops with me as the reader.  The story, like Poor Folk, is written as an exchange of letters between two people.  Early on, I discover that one or both of the narrators is willfully lying.  This puts me in an interesting place.  Dostoevsky gives me two different takes on the world of this story, and he leaves it up to me to decipher the truth.

The story he lays before me almost reads like a detective mystery, except that instead of trying to ferret out a murderer, I’m just trying to ferret out what on earth’s going on with these people.  I collect data from each of the narrators on the different characters and events.  And just when I start to feel like I’ve got the story figured out, the next letter blasts apart my theory.  

The dueling narrators create a chaos from which I try to make patterns.  The further into the story I wander, the more intricate my pattern has to become so that by the time I emerge from the final sentence, I achieve something like order.  Almost.  I’ve read the story several times, and I’m still not one hundred percent clear on what happened.

But that’s the thing.  What makes this story so juicy is its sense of subtext.  The whole time I’m reading, I get this tip-of-the-iceberg feeling: I know this narrator’s saying xyz, but what is he really saying?  I just can’t get enough of this sort of thing as a reader.  I think it’s because of the sense of reality this style of writing creates between writer and reader.  If Dostoevsky were just to invent this world and then explain it to me, it wouldn’t be nearly as exciting or profound.  Instead, Dostoevsky maps out for me a typography of the characters and convinces me that something more important is beneath their surface.  I want to know what’s beneath, and so I start to read more actively, hunting for signs of the subterranean secrets.  

And here is where the importance of the ambiguous ending comes in.  If Dostoevsky were then to make it perfectly clear what lies beneath, the unspoken reality that seemed to hover between him and me would evaporate.  On the other hand, if he betrays my trust, and I start to suspect that there’s nothing underneath, that he just created a tidy, meaningless puzzle, then I would feel cheated.  Why had I spent all that energy to find out what was beneath these characters only to have Dostoevsky mystically wiggle his fingers at me and say “I guess we’ll never know?”

But he doesn’t do this.  He gives me enough to sense that there’s something there, yet he doesn’t reduce it to explanations.  He lets it hover between us.