The Tartan

By Stephen Makin

I recently finished reading “The Brothers Karamazov” in a bid to increase my pretentiousness tenfold by the time that I finally become an upperclassman. In short, I loved it — for me, it is an easy eight out of ten, losing points for occasional long-windedness and the addition of many characters with only incidental roles. Time has also made some of its key moments feel a bit clichéd in retrospect, but that can’t be helped. The ending might have made me cry had I not been trying to keep up appearances in front of a close friend, and I appreciate any piece of literature that can do that.

However, one aspect of “The Brothers Karamazov” is making itself increasingly difficult to ignore the more blatantly that I attempt to ignore it — put simply, there is a certain class of character found throughout the novel which I cannot help but realize is no longer seen in contemporary fiction (at least not in the longform content that people actually read, and at least not in this country). I am referring to a role which I am going to call the “religious paragon.” “Theological paragon” might also be correct, or to a lesser extent, “moral” or “philosophical paragon”. 

In “The Brothers Karamazov,” we find a bare minimum of two of these: 

The first is Aleksei Fyodorovich Karamazov, one of the three (four?) brothers denoted in the title. Aleksei may be described as a person of utmost faith and diligence, and one whom people find themselves suddenly and bizarrely fond of even from the first moment of their meeting. These qualities are established swiftly and are never once infringed upon. He is also deeply religious, having become so not long before the novel’s beginning. He lives at a monastery in the mountains outside of town. 

The second paragon is Aleksei’s mentor at the monastery, one Elder Zosima. So holy is Zosima that many people in town attribute miracles to him, and when he finally bites the big one, they wait around for more.

These two men are made paragons by virtue of their infallibility. This is an important word here. Both Zosima and Aleksei (in that order; the latter seems to take up the mantle of the former as the book goes on) are used as objective lenses of total good by Dostoevsky. Whatever the decision happens to be, Zosima and Aleksei are doing the right thing at the end of the day. This can be an odd sentiment, though, and it is precisely this infallibility which has pushed the paragon character out of fashion over the years. They are, inherently, tensionless. If a character is never wrong, how can anything ever happen? But prose is like the mansion in “Clue,” in that secret passageways abound throughout, and sometimes they are of incredible use to the investigator, or sometimes they are utterly useless and stupid. There is always a workaround, and for his paragons, Dostoevsky generates tension thusly:

The first method is confusion. More specifically, confusing his readers as to precisely why the paragon in question makes a certain choice at a certain time. If a character is never wrong, and readers are already wise to this concept and rolling with it, so to speak, then the sudden introduction of an awful-sounding idea from the character’s head may come off as something of a shock. Take the decision on the part of Aleksei to — seemingly at random, or at least stemming from some sudden burst of sentiment — impede on the life of one Captain Nikolai Ilyich Snegiryov and his son around midway through the novel. Aleksei takes pity on Snegiryov’s poverty, and engages in a bizarre sequence of ill-received money-lending. In the moment, readers may be inclined to judge Aleksei’s actions as nonsensical, or even quite rude. But by the end — and here I will refrain from spoiling anything for those who haven’t yet had the time to digest eight hundred pages, CMU students especially — the decisions surely justify themselves to even the most hard-hearted soul. 

As for the second method, it has more to do with the characters themselves than with readers, coming internally within the paragons’ heads. If a character is infallible and thus never wrong, surely one can scarcely imagine the pressure. This is a serious statement — being right all of the time must be a terribly difficult job, although I suppose it takes one to know one. As such, tension comes when paragons take a little bit longer to come to conclusions that readers have already taken for granted. Take, for example, around the end of the first act of the novel when the Elder Zosima tells Aleksei to leave behind the confines of the monastery and help his family. Aleksei takes a great deal of time to actually agree, and for a while, he seems ill at ease about the whole matter. Of course, to readers, the decision is obvious — if for no other reason than extreme familiarity with the ubiquitous “hero’s journey” plot wheel. Aleksei has to go home. Every second that he spends doing anything else becomes a tension-well.

Finally, tension can stem from conflicts of absolutes. If a certain character represents absolute good, then it would make all too much sense for him to generally be able to sway the minds and opinions of others (even moderately bad people) to his way of thinking with time. But what if the absolute good — that is, our paragon — is brought into the presence of absolute evil? Arguably, the closest that we actually see to absolute evil in “The Brothers Karamazov” is the murdered patriarch, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov. He cares only for money, alcohol, and sex, and has no particular skills apart from “sponging” money from more intelligent people. He has no interest in raising children, sending his own away at young ages, and has possibly fathered an illegitimate child whom he later presses into servitude. Towards the novel’s beginning, we see a fascinating encounter at the monastery between Fyodor and the Elder Zosima — but what happens? Fyodor puts on a ridiculous show. Feeling the pressure of ultimate goodness, he openly humiliates himself and his family, and is removed from the premises.

Now that the viability of a paragon in fiction is established, what actually makes one? Who all qualifies? Moral goodness is tacked — but is it necessarily tied to religion? Let me point to a new character as a case study: Fetyukovich, the defense attorney of Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov, a man falsely accused of having murdered his father yet subject to almost insurmountable evidence.

Fetyukovich himself has no inherent ties to faith, aside from a certain spiel that he gives about Orthodox values and what they should mean in the context of the case to the men of the jury, and this is already a rebuttal more than anything. He is not a monk, like Zosima or Aleksei, and has no obligation to God in any professional sense. However, he treats law as a kind of religion, and becomes incensed at the prosecution’s suggestion that his case for his client is based largely on “pathos.” He is regarded as an incredible lawyer, and his arrival from Moscow has a similar effect as might be expected of a cardinal arriving from Rome. He is treated with a distinct, almost holy, dignity.

And law is a sort of religion, isn’t it? In the spirit of the thing, really — it’s a set of laws imagined to imbue a group of people with a certain moral code to which not everybody inherently wants to subscribe. It is, on one hand, unnatural and limiting, but is simultaneously intended to raise a group of people to a higher standard. And just like we no longer read books or watch films about all-good religious paragons, neither do we often consume any media about all-good paragons of law and order. 

“But wait!” you shout, banging your fist on the table. “My aging parents sit up on the couch all evening binging new episodes of “NCIS”!” 

To which I reply — it’s not the same thing. Characters on police television shows, while common, are rarely all-good. They have messy pasts, make dark decisions — this is where the problems of the series stem from. This also goes for American war films. Problems are created — and later solved to a greater extent — by the renegade, bad-boy fighter pilot played by Tom Cruise. I mean this fully seriously, and it’s true everywhere and anywhere, including John Grisham novels which are generally their own animal anyway. And in real literary fiction, ever since the collapse of high modernism in the first half of the previous century, characters have become lab experiments with morals designed to initiate questions.

For me, the best example of a notable absence of religious paragons in modern media is “Star Wars.” A helpful tip: if you’re ever in need of an example for anything at all, look at “Star Wars” and you’ll probably find it. It’s a wide-reaching dataset of a great many topics with roots in serious reality, yet never serious enough to actually offend anyone when delving into hot issues.

Recall that the Force is actually a religion, objectively, to quote a certain Imperial officer in “A New Hope,” and then my point will probably make more sense. 

Luke Skywalker comes the closest out of any character in that franchise to being an absolute religious paragon. At the end of Episode VI, he is a fully-fledged Jedi married to a certain set of ideals, imbued with wisdom to defeat the Emperor and bring Darth Vader back to the light. He has absolutely zero reason to become anything else. But because such a thing would likely be boring onscreen, two certain Hollywood savants (J.J. Abrams and Rian Johnson) decided to eliminate all of his character development in one fell swoop, having Luke attempt to murder one of his students in the middle of the night and flee to a faraway planet without warning.

Who else comes close? Master Yoda and Mace Windu are almost there, but both fall short on their own time. They are indicative, quite incredibly, of the modern perception of religious characters. New religious characters create tension in two main ways: either through harmful blindness to human compassion beneath adherence to religious dogma (Windu) or blindness to objective logic beneath extreme religious confidence (Yoda). 

What about non-Force-users? For this, we need to go back to Fetyukovich. If we can agree that law is a religion, and adherence to/belief in the admirable aspects of a fair judicial system is akin to belief in the credo of religious faith, then we have to pay a nod to the senators. Padme Amidala is almost a paragon — she screws it up by screwing with Anakin. But when she gives birth to twins and dies, giving her children away, one of the recipients is a man called Bail Organa. He is entirely paragonic in nature — fighting the onset of the Empire politically until the very end, yet never stooping to any low means to do so — and it is for precisely this reason that he receives incredibly little screen time. He is boring without the intrigue that stems from his being a spy, a bit to which he’s not fully willing to commit.

To speak my peace, I want more religious paragons in fiction. They’ve been silent for much too long. I think that the lack of them represents a telling lack of something else — that is, a lack of any kind of objective sense of morals whatsoever. People have a hard time believing that anything significant may be objectively good or objectively bad, be it faith or law regardless. And the worst part is that I totally understand this point of view. Anybody can spin a story one way or another. One’s opinion of something, anything, can sway like the wind depending on the person who first informed one of its existence. That’s a sad way for the world to be, and the only way to challenge it is to put forward ideas in a succinct, literary fashion. Have the courage to present (and accept) your own ideas as truth. Besides, you’re a pretty smart guy. So why not?

By Stephen Makin