DDDP: End of part two
I don’t even know what page I’m really on anymore. I read the appendix, the censored ninth chapter of Part Two, so I guess I’m at 458 plus the thirty some extra. There are about 200 hundred pages left to go.
With the new variations in this second part, I’ve figured out some of the aspects of the book that I don’t enjoy. Pretty much every passage that was fun to read was one where the narrator was not involved. This book is effectively written from the view of an omniscent third party, so it seems like the book would be better if Fyodor Michaelovich wasn’t pretending that his all-seeing eye is also a character. Watching Pyotor Stepanovich and Nikolai Vsevolodovich, both nearly insane but in different ways, can be fascinating, but that G?v joker could take the fun out of a circus on the moon. I like it when the narrator disappears; the story becomes at those points more about the characters and less about tediously overt reactions to the characters.
The book is also fun when people go totally off their rockers, but, like Krusty taught us, it’s only funny if the sap’s got dignity. Anything that Stepan Trofimovich does is annoying and dull. Nikolai Vsevolodovich’s confession was interesting, and Pyotor Stepanovich’s breakdown after the meeting was riveting. Even the governor’s breakdown was fun to read, but then Mr. Narrator came back in and drug the whole rest of that last chapter back into dullsville. Yulia Mikhailovna’s entourage seems like it could be interesting—it’s a bunch of spoiled rich youth on the path to anarchy—but the narrator seems to view them as little more than spoiled youth.
No one’s died yet, and only a couple of the chapters in this section seemed to be moving the plot towards that eventual climax. Most of my curiosity at this point about Part Three is what’s going to happen to eat up all of those pages. I hope it’s not all taken up by that stupid fête.