Visually Mapping the Narrative System of Dostoevsky's The Idiot

This research creates a visual system for analyzing Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. I define five factors—space, time, character (individual actor), network (unique aggregate of certain actors), and narrative voice—and visually explore their dyadic and triadic relationships. Taking the dyad of character and network, I identify all named entities within the novel and describe each person to whom they are connected. I then define factors for determining the degree of closeness in each of these relationships, and represent the degree via line value; those more closely related will be connected by thicker, darker lines. Other dyads and triads rely on visualizing schemes inspired by music notation, thermal imaging, and set theory. In visualizing and representing the novel’s varied mechanisms and parts, I track the evolution of Dostoevsky’s narrative and artistic system at a bird’s eye view. The Idiot is a vast narrative universe rich in events, actors, and narratorial turns; the reader’s task is additionally overwhelmed by the novel’s sheer mass and density. The Idiot’s layered sources of complexity invite the visual approach undertaken in this study.