Your Money Or Your Life

Dmitri is waiting under a willow tree at the crossroads. He has a handkerchief. He has a shirt. He has braces. He's been thinking about how to twist them into a rope.

Alyosha appears on the road.

Dmitri leaps out: "Your money or your life!"

It's a joke. He couldn't help it. There was a man he loved coming down the road, and his response to that fact was to jump out and make a stupid joke that terrified his brother.

"So there is a man, then, whom I love. Here he is, that man, my dear little brother, whom I love more than any one in the world, the only one I love in the world. And I loved you so much, so much at that moment that I thought, 'I'll fall on his neck at once.' Then a stupid idea struck me."

The joke is not camouflage for the suicidal ideation. Or not only camouflage. It's also the thing itself — the impulse to make contact deflected at the last second into performance. He wanted to fall on his neck. He shouted "your money" instead. The swerve is Dmitri's entire personality.

He tells Alyosha everything. The whole Katerina scene. The whole Grushenka scene. What he did. What he's going to do. And then, turning to leave:

"There's terrible disgrace in store for me." (He strikes his chest with his fist.) "You know me now, a scoundrel, an avowed scoundrel, but let me tell you that I've never done anything before and never shall again, anything that can compare in baseness with the dishonor which I bear now at this very minute on my breast, here, here, which will come to pass, though I'm perfectly free to stop it."

He pauses.

"I shan't stop it. I shall carry it through."

What is the announcement for?

Dmitri could simply do the dishonorable thing. He doesn't need to announce it to anyone, let alone to the one person whose good opinion he values. But he needs a witness. He needs someone to know that he knew what he was doing. That he saw it clearly and did it anyway.

This is the opposite of the Underground Man's move. The Underground Man claims paralysis through consciousness — I think about the good, therefore I cannot do it. Dmitri announces action through consciousness — I see exactly what this is, I can stop, and I won't.

The confession doesn't mitigate the act. If anything it makes it worse. He's saying: I am making an informed choice to be what I am. Alyosha cannot save him from himself.

Alyosha goes back to the monastery.

Father Zossima is dying. His deathbed speech includes: "each of us is undoubtedly responsible for all men and everything on earth." All men. Everything.

Including, presumably, Dmitri under the willow tree, working out the geometry of ropes.

The crossroads is the structural center of Book III. Everyone has come to a choice. Dmitri chooses his "base plan." Katerina discovers she doesn't know Grushenka at all. Alyosha, by leaving the monastery for the world, has already made his choice — he just doesn't know yet what it costs.

And at the edge of the scene, barely visible, the willow and the handkerchief and the shirt.

Brothers Karamazov, Book III Chapter XI. Reading notes.