There is a terrible sequentiality in all this as in “The house that Jack built.” Events pile up, and every slender straw thrown on the heap is arsonous. The town is tinder, ready to ignite at a touch. Of course this is mainly the work of Pyotr Stepanovich, who has prepared the ground. Yet there are times when the alarming incidents seem to have their source in some indefinable larger causality. Moreover such implacable sequiturs are not usual in Dostoievsky, where normally there is room for the arbitrary, the non-sequitur. Here the only non-sequitur is the unexpected arrival of Shatov’s wife, and this is also the only episode that has no effect on things to come. It is as though the reasoning process going on in the characters’ heads had been copied by outward events, which seem to be obeying Aristotelian logic with never an undistributed middle term. The implacable sequiturs may be comical, too, since the chain of logic, inevitably, is made up of both large beads and small beads, so that if an end-result is a very small bead—the governor in a Swiss rest-home—it is grotesquely out of proportion with the horrors that had led up to it.
Much of this appearance of logic is due to the device of the supposedly objective narrator used here by Dostoievsky. In Crime and Punishment, the reader was mostly inside Raskolnikov, listening to his thoughts. In The Possessed—with the exception of the suppressed chapter, “Stavrogin’s Confession”—everything is told from the outside, by a gossipy young friend of Stepan Trofimovich’s, who enjoys his confidence as well as that of the governor’s wife, so that he is well placed to tell what went on. He draws no moral conclusions, not being qualified to serve as the author’s representative; he simply and somewhat excitedly reports, as though setting the facts straight for some visitor who had missed out on that momentous period “among us.” The events are related from hindsight, as he has pieced them together, looking back and verifying where he can. And, like anything seen from hindsight, they fit into a clear sequence of cause and effect—the opposite of what we experience with Raskolnikov, whose perspective is toward the future, hence still open-ended. Moreover the narrator of The Possessed, in the interests of historical accuracy, feels obliged not to leave out any detail that might complete the picture. Since he is not quite confident, even looking backward, of being able to distinguish what was important from what was unimportant, we get that comical mixture, typical of gossip, of the relevant and the irrelevant. The mountains are confused with the valleys; the whole moral landscape is obligingly flattened out for our inspection.
This unconsciousness of scale on the part of the narrator is one of the delights of the novel. We understand that we can trust his veracity but not always his judgment; some of the opinions he utters echo in our minds more loudly than he seems to expect. For instance, the well-known passage in the introductory chapter: “At one time it was reported about the town that our little circle was a hotbed of nihilism, profligacy, and godlessness, and the rumor gained more and more strength. And yet we did nothing but engage in the most harmless, agreeable, typically Russian, light-hearted liberal chatter.” He is referring to the circle around old Stepan Trofimovich and is saying considerably more than he is aware of saying. To Dostoievsky’s mind, the little circle, in the last analysis, has been pretty much what rumor said, all the while maintaining a double screen of illusion about itself. Its members are less dangerous than they generally like to think (here the narrator is right) but more dangerous in their frivolity than he is capable of knowing. In lightly dismissing their talk as harmless, he shows an obliviousness of real consequences that marks him for Dostoievsky as a typical unthinking liberal. The circle of idle chatterers around Stepan Trofimovich was dangerous because it prepared the way for the hyper-active circles that sprang up on the cleared ground.