Taylor Evans April 21, 2018 "My brothers are destroying themselves," he went on, "my father, too. And they're destroying others with them. This is the 'earthy force of the Karamazovs,' as Father Paissy put it the other day--earthy and violent, raw ... Whether the Spirit of God is moving over that force--even that I do not know. I only know that I myself am a Karamazov." This passage addresses Dostoevsky’s duality between the angel and the insect, the constant presence of evil and destruction in the world, and Alyosha’s personal morality concerns. Firstly, this passage refers to the Karamazovs as earthy, violent, raw people, essentially saying they are lowly scum. A common theme throughout the novel is that of the insect vs angels, or in other words, those who give in to their earthly desires and those who hold their spirituality higher than their desires. This passage hints that the Karamazovs are more like insects than angels as they are “earthly” and “raw”, but Alyosha hopes that God will come into their lives and change them from insects into angels, into people who care more for their spiritual fulfillment than for their materialistic wants. A second theme that is present in this passage is the acknowledgment of all the evil that is present in the world. This passage demonstrates Alyosha’s acknowledgement of his family’s sinful nature, and the fact that it’s so much a part of them, that he doesn’t even know if God himself can fix their evilness. A part of Ivan’s Rebellion speech addresses the evil that consumes this world (Book V, Chapter 4), and this passage shows that the Karamazovs themselves contribute greatly to this sinful world. This affects Alyosha’s ability to define himself. He believes in God, but doesn’t believe that he could have naturally evil blood in his veins, therefore is he begins to worry that perhaps
