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Dostoevsky expresses his doubts about the propriety of Being through the character of Ivan who, if you remember, is the articulate, handsome, sophisticated brother (and greatest adversary) of the monastic novitiate, Alyosha. "It's not God I don't accept. Understand this," says Ivan. "I do not accept the world that He created, this world of God's, and cannot agree with it."
Ivan tells Alyosha a story about a small girl whose parents punished her by locking her in a freezing outhouse overnight (a story Dostoevsky culled from a newspaper of the time). "Can you just see those two snoozing away while their daughter was crying all night?" says Ivan. "And imagine this little child: unable to understand what was happening to her, beating her frozen little chest and crying meek little tears, begging 'gentle Jesus' to get her out of that horrible place!...Alyosha: if you were somehow promised that the world could finally have complete and total peace-but only on the condition that you tortured one little child to death-say, that girl who was freezing in the outhouse...Would you do it?" Alyosha demurs, "No, I would not," he says softly. He would not do what God seems to freely allow.Share
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