you can put spoilers up for readers who haven't read the work yet, but for the record, spoilers don't necessarily ruin anything for me, personally.
so this is where we can discuss the elements of style in our favorite books.
i'll start: the first actual novel i read as an adult, being interesting in actually reading a novel and not just being told that i should (ie Animal Farm. still gotta give it another go, it being such a short novella) was... Crime and Punishment.
i have read a few since finishing that one... i've read The Stranger by Camus, i've read Moby Dick, and i've read The Road by Mccarthy.
i will start from the beginning though. Thus Spoke Zarathustra is for all intents and purposes a philosophy book written in a very complex and novel form. but it just don't count here. it's way more philosophical reading than it is fiction, unlike say The Stranger.
but i enjoyed it immensely... i'd, in a very cliched manner, literally, go out into the summer winds and read the book out in the grove near my house outloud word for word. it was very fun and endearing that way. so i decided to do the same with the books i've read up till then save Infinite Jest; which is fun to read aloud but is still equally enthralling to read to myself, and plus it's fucking huge, don't know if i'd be finished even within the year reading it like that.
but Crime and Punishment: that is the only book, so far, that had me going back and reading things to get better idea's of what i was reading...Moby Dick had a little of that, but very little. it was, despite being a complex narrative, very simple in terms of characters and it's plot. and the others are just even more simple. save IJ which is just unique in it's own way. every line amalgamates from one to the next, so succinctly that it literally defies the need to be re-read or critically examined, in terms of character development and plot. which i love. completely unique and ingenious.
but really Crime and Punishment might be the best thing i've ever read, still.
i will discuss the plot in more detail later, but the main thing i want to say about the novel is that it's clever in it's interpretation of "the working forces" that drift in and out of the plot, and in the characters decisions or indecision's.
there are two pivotal points here: one: the "light" and sting of one's conscience; and two: the "darkness" and unknowingness of the unconscious mind.
during the book these themes are tread upon time and time again.
the main character Raskolnikov makes his decisions with an air of superiority because of his views on "whom takes deserves", which he even has his own thesis on, as a student of criminal psychology.
along the way, the only thing that keeps him from being caught by anyone in terms of his actions, and in terms of his idealism, is pure coincidence. and this is important. he doesn't actually get away with anything because of his knowledge or intellect. everything screws up, no matter how hard he thinks his actions through... because he is thinking about actions that simply cannot be controlled...not from an individual level, but a collective group level. his actions cannot be allowed, and they are condemned, but he always gets away with them because of people's readiness to take the potential of people's desperation with a grain of salt. no one is ready to believe any one individual you know can do something as horrible as kill someone else in cold blood, until it happens. until they're caught.
and because of these coincidences that leave Raskolnikov completely innocent-seeming and leave others painted moreso guilty than himself, because of the character's unwillingness to believe that Raskolnikov could even do such a thing, and the evidence to support that view; even though they are dead wrong.
and then there is the otherside of the intricacies. these facets aforementioned are all unknowns and randomness. chaos. he gets away with his actions because he's seemingly right about the world. some people deserve the get axed, cause no one likes them, and no one would miss them. right?
but actions of that nature, reflect to the conscience of the main character Raskolnikov and eventually lead to him conjuring his own demons up for himself. trying to devise reasons why it was justified for his actions, to have killed, and to remain innocent all at once, leads him to confessing things to people who might be scrutinizing him, and the events, (including his best and most rational friend, Razumikhin, and the police and detective/investigator Porfiry) and eventually even worse, feeling like he needs to justify his actions to himself, because of his self-righteousness.
which he inevitably cannot, because he gets tied up in his own hypocrisy. the only reason he "snaps" and decides to "really go through with his intent in planning", is because of his sister getting proposed to by the ignorant Luzhin; but little does he know that along the course of events, that he too would fall in love and wish to propose to the daughter of a poor family, simply for the fact that he feels like he needs to have her by his side, as his confidant, the only person he can trust with the knowledge of what he's done, and the fact that he can make her trust him, very much like his sister's previous lover Svidrigailov, whom was a dastardly secretive manipulator and potentially killer, whom actually made his sister a viable wife to Luhzin, if not solely for the dower of their being wed, poor and rich.
which infuriates Raskolnikov to the point of doing what he does, so in the end, he ends up having to right his wrongs, in order to avoid becoming like Svidrigailov, whom has a quite different outcome in his life, in the end, than Raskolnikov...whom ends up going to jail and serving his time, so he can be without his guilty conscience and actually care for his sister legitimately (especially since the events of his mother passing while in jail, meaning more than ever he needs to protect his only family, now that's left), and in order to help Sonya, the daughter of the poor family whom he gets wrapped up in the chaos and drama of, because of his qualms with his conscience.
it's a really interesting character study, to me...me, being someone who never really had done that sort of thing before, seriously.
the book is nearly flawless. the hidden things remain hidden, and coincidental, and explainable as randomness, but although culminating into a total ideation of the forces behind the following actions. and the conscience clears it's woes with the same deft and hidden hand.
Edited by akira_akuma (06/17/15 03:11 PM)
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