A Typology of Embedded Texts in The Brothers Karamazov

Abstract

Several segments of Brothers Karamazov are marked off from the rest of the text as composed or uttered by one of the characters. Alesha, for example, writes book 6, chapters 2 and 3, The Life and Teachings of the Elder Zosima; Dmitrii speaks most of book 3, chapters 3 to 5, The of an Ardent Heart; and Ivan most of book 5, chapters 4 and 5, Rebellion and The Grand Inquisitor. These chapters, marked off as separate units in the text, form internal or embedded texts within the novel itself and therefore can be expected to be of special significance to the system of the novel. It seems logical that the embedded texts produced in the world of the novel by the three Karamazov brothers should reflect in some way the dominant modus significandi of each of the brothers, their manner of seeing or producing meaning. Do the phenomenological differences between the embedded texts somehow reflect the various means of encoding and decoding associated with the three brothers? First it is necessary to establish the identity of these three passages as texts. Texts appear against the background of nontexts because they are distinguished by various text features.1 embedded texts, then, should appear against the background of the novel as a whole, and they should be distinguished by text features. With the advent of writing, texts were distinguished from nontexts by graphic fixation. At least one such text can be found in the world of Brothers Karamazov: Alesha's account of the life and teachings of Zosima, which the narrator gives us po rukopisi Alekseia Fedorovicha Karamazova.2 Likewise, Ivan's story of the Grand Inquisitor was conceived as a literary text, although it was never written down. Finally, Dmitrii's Confession of an Ardent Heart, though written only by the narrator, will be shown to have a number of text features and functions. I shall examine these three embedded texts in terms of features that distinguish them from each other and from the rest of the novel and in terms of the role they play in the larger text. three chapters entitled Ispoved' goriachego serdtsa (The of an Ardent Heart) comprise the simplest of the three embedded texts mentioned above. semiotic simplicity of this embedded text makes it the hardest to distinguish against the background of the novel as a whole. Nevertheless, it does have certain text features. Dmitrii's confession is divided into three chapters, the unity of which is suggested by their titles and by their contiguity in the text and in the world of the novel. subtitles suggest typical textual