Should Pain (Literally) Move Us?

When I finished Dostoevsky’s White Nights, I wasn’t left wondering whether the narrator and Nastenka should have ended up together. After all, four nights is hardly enough time to truly fall in love with someone.

Those four nights are however, clearly more than enough time to fall in love with an idea.

The end result is a doomed love story and a moving study of loneliness.

It’s only 55 pages by the way.

I’ve read some other reviews, and a lot of people seem to focus on the tenderness of the ending. The narrator, despite his heartbreak, chooses gratitude over bitterness. Basically, he decides that a single moment of genuine happiness is enough to justify the pain he’s going through (or not through, as I’ll discuss).

Which is a beautiful thing, at least I think it’s meant to be.

I found it a bleak and sad reflection on how little improvement we’ve made at dealing with stuff since 1848.

One alternative ending I found myself imagining was that the narrator returns to his lonley, dilapidated apartment, notices another figure, and instead of retreating into his room, simply says to the stranger, “Good evening.”

Or something? I’m sure Dostoevsky could write it better than me.

I thought:
Maybe this experience might have changed the way he inhabits the world?

Big D does hint at this at least a bit…
“In the end, you feel that your much-vaunted, inexhaustible fantasy is growing tired, debilitated, exhausted, because you’re bound to grow out of your old ideals; they’re smashed to splinters and turn to dust, and if you have no other life, you have no choice but to keep rebuilding your dreams... And it is vain to dig in the ashes of your old fancies, trying to find even a tiny spark to fan into a new flame that will warm the chilled heart…”

Anyway, as I’ve been writing this I’ve realised this criticism isn’t really about the book at all.

It’s about what I believe pain should do to us.

If any experience never leaves the confines of our thoughts, no matter how profound it felt, has it truly changed us?

Reflection like this grants us the opportunity to feel noble. Permission, even, to romanticise ourselves in the same way the narrator did in his short-lived romance with Nastenka: “A whole minute of bliss! Is that really so little?”

I fester when I live life like that. Until, eventually, I become a treachery of my true self.

Less poetically, what it actually does is allow us to avoid asking a more disturbing question: what would I have to change in order for this not to be the only bliss I ever get?

It reminds me of a shit apology actually.

I had this pretty strict teacher in Year 5 at primary school, he used to sit bolt upright on the benches in assembly. I’d say something like “Sorry Mr Fletcher.” And he’d go: “It’s not an apology if your behaviour doesn’t change.” I can’t really remember the wording he used exactly, but you get the point.

Thing is, if all of that “change” happens privately, inside our own internal mythology, then nothing has changed. You’ll just make the same mistakes and draw the same private conclusions again, like the narrator in White Nights.

Here’s an interesting thing about the word emotion. It derives from the Latin emovere: e- meaning “out” and movere meaning “to move.” Whatever else an emotion may be, its origins suggest movement.

We don’t need a happier ending. But if emotion is at least etymologically, a move outward, then the tragedy of White Nights isn’t that the narrator is left alone with his thoughts.

The tragedy is that even his love, and his pain, including all of his tender pettiness, becomes just another dream.

Welcome to the new subscribers from the AI detection essay.

Those of you who’ve been on the mailing list for a while may have received an earlier draft of this one. Sorry for the re-publish. It wasn’t ready, and I pressed go far too soon.

Have a good week!