Narrative Ethics and Trauma-Form in The Brothers Karamazov

Document Type : Original Research Article

Author

Associate Professor, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Tehran

Abstract

This article argues that The Brothers Karamazov does not merely represent trauma as content but constructs a trauma-form: a repeatable narrative mechanism that produces ethical pressure by positioning the reader as a juror of damaged testimony. To make this claim operational, the essay offers four analytically separable formal processes, rupture, recurrence, testimonial gap, and juridical capture, and demonstrates how they function across key scenes including Ivan’s “Rebellion” and “Grand Inquisitor” materials, Smerdyakov’s confessional sequences, and Dmitri’s trial. Drawing on trauma and testimony theory alongside narrative ethics, the paper shows how Dostoevsky’s narration converts breakdown, contradiction, and withheld verification into conditions of judgment, recruiting readers into decision under uncertainty rather than offering stable evidentiary resolution. Moral injury is used here as a critical heuristic for the ethical damage produced when adjudication is demanded without reliable grounds. By shifting trauma studies from a vocabulary of inner states to a protocol for reading narrative address and evidentiary form, the article provides a transferable method for tracing how novels engineer responsibility through testimonial contamination and the pressures of public verdict.

Keywords

References

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