Dostoevsky's Rebellion

Believing that life is ultimately not worth living is the root and complete and utter lack of happiness, realizing that nothing you do, even the things that could bring you joy mean anything beyond what they immediately are is a difficult life to lead. The only way to enjoy happiness is to live under some sort of illusion, one being a leap of faith and the other, absurdity, where lack of meaning does not necessarily mean lack of reason to live “A man defines himself by his make-believe as well as by his sincere impulses. There is thus a lower key of feelings, inaccessible in the heart but partially descended by the acts they imply and the attitudes of mind they assume” (Camus, 11). Those who live absurdly live the same way as those …show more content…
That both characters are a reflection of what can be found inside. The devil the mirror image of human atrocity. We see this in Ivan’s devil, who is very much like him, but is slightly different. Similarly, the image of God that we create is one that reflects the good things inside of us, what we want to be. From this, we have to understand suffering and happiness on its own personal level. If we can decide what the ultimate truth is, what the divine is, then we have to be able to define for ourselves whether our existence is aligned with that. Being able to envision and create the ultimate good and evil, must mean that a person has control over which absolute he becomes or that he remains somewhere in the middle, happy or otherwise is his own choice. But seeing one without the other is an illusion, because they both exists within us and to focus on one could mean to deny the …show more content…
With any of these arguments, the person is required to desire to find a meaning in life and experiences suffering at the failure of that mission. Ultimately, anyone who is starving for the answer to these existential questions is not going to find it in any of these theories. For each one relies on an inevitable lack of ultimate truth. Kierkegaard argues that suffering is avoidable through a relationship with the divine and that part of himself within us, but as we are all only have infinite, there is that constant, finite piece of our being that it keeping us from the true relationship with the eternal that we crave. Ivan from Dostoevsky like Kierkegaard concludes that there is something greater out there, a God of sorts, but struggles to find contentment because he cannot understand him. In this way, understanding the ultimate good and evil as a reflection of himself still fails to leave Ivan in any place of joy, struggling in “The Devil” from his illness that has caused the hallucinating

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