Dmitri And Pyotr Ilyich's Speech Summary

In this selection from a conversation between Dmitri and Pyotr Ilyich, the dominant speaker, Dmitri, expressed complex and contradictory emotions than speak to his conflicted state of mind. In the first portion of his speech, the rapid pace of topic change, the jumpy, rushed tone, and sheer abundance of exclamation marks reflect Dmitri’s excited yet somewhat muddled state of mind. This reveals that the nonchalant exclamation “The pistols are nonsense too! Drink and stop imagining things,” is not simply directed at Pyotr, for the sake of ridding his friend’s mind of care and to convince him to join in drinking. He is simultaneously trying to convince himself to ignore “the nonsense,” to “stop imagining things,” to indulge in the moment. In addition, his frenzied …show more content…
What is this care that is burdening Dmitri, and how does it drive him to this state of excited agitation? The narrator’s vague diction leaves this open to the reader’s interpretation, yet the speech that follows provides more insight into Dmitri’s sadness. “Do you remember Hamlet?” he asks, continuing in this allusion with “‘I am sad, so sad, Horatio…Ach, poor Yorick!’” This is, in fact, a misquote of the original text from Hamlet, “Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio,” but it is precisely this mistake that emphasizes the significance of this burden of “sadness” for Dmitri. The “Yorick” scene in Hamlet involves Prince Hamlet’s contemplation on mortality—in the end, all humans will die. At the point of this scene in The Brothers Karamazov, Dmitri has made plans to visit Grushenka one last time, then kill himself. In this scene of self-revelation that resembles a Hamlet-style soliloquy, Dmitri’s inner conflict—life or death—is laid bare. He is conscious of impending death, yet he wavers in his suicide plan. He stresses the beauty of life to himself, and rather than boldness, feels