The Enigmatic Ga-v: A defense of the narrator-chronicler in Dostoevsky's Demons

Abstract

The chronicler-narrator of Dostoevsky's Demons, Anton Lavrentievich Ga-v, seems like an inscrutable and oscillatory storyteller. On the one hand he is profusely talkative and repeatedly justifies his position as narrator; on the other, he reports scenes that he did not witness and could not have direct knowledge about, including what people say and even think. The spectrum of responses from Dostoevsky critics includes some saying that the novel has "technical inconsistencies," others claiming that there are in fact two narrators (the character Ga-v and a separate omniscient authorial narrator), and yet others developing the notion of an "ambivalent meaning" behind the text. Even those who accept Ga-v as a single narrator come to the conclusion that he has invented much of the story, and is himself, like the character of Peter Stepanovich Verkhovensky, one of the novel's "devils.""The Enigmatic Ga-v" examines these many interpretations, and confronts them with counterexamples that demonstrate why the novel is neither inconsistent nor ambivalent. After culling Doestoevsky's text for the few clues he gives into Ga-v's own character, the article compares the characters and narrative methods of Ga-v and Peter Verkhovensky in order to distinguish between their radically different motivations-giving us access to the diverging meaning behind each one's telling. The Enigmatic Ga-v attempts to recover both Dostoevsky's intention to create such a convoluted narrator, and at the same time defend that narrator against the notion of his being a "devil." It argues that, in order to apprehend the full implication of the events, a reader must face the dilemma over whether or not to believe that Ga-v can tell the truth even when he wasn't present to witness ita-suggesting an ethical plane to the interpretation of his narrational border crossing. © 2012 The Russian Review.