Essay Questions

The Gentle Creature's marriage to the Pawnbroker is an unhappy one. Using illustrations from Dostoevsky’s A Gentle Creature, write an essay to support this notion.

Dostoevsky’s A Gentle Creature begins with a scene inside a pawn shop in which there is a girl lying on the floor dead. The author employs first person narration in which he uses the Pawnbrokers point of view to bring to the reader’s attention the particular events leading to the occasion of the dead girl on the floor of the shop. In this flashback that the narrator has it becomes clear that the girl who was also his wife had been orphaned at a young age and was living with her aunt.

The narrator becomes ultimately smitten by the girl’s high ambience and degree of dignity. Later after getting wind of the fact that her aunt was looking to marry the girl off to one obese shopkeeper, the narrator makes his own offer which the girl accepts being a lesser of the evil. However, after being married to the narrator, he begins to exercise dominance on her. As the story progresses, the themes of power, submission and dominance become evident in the way that the narrator treats the girl. The narrator becomes increasingly stingy and rarely talks to his young wife. As such, the young lady becomes increasingly unhappy around him to an extent that she sees death as the only solution. Ultimately, she commits suicide as she is unable to cope with life with the pawnbroker.

A Gentle Creature is Dostoevsky’s exploration of depression and suicide among the younger generation. Support this statement using illustrations from the novel.

In the story, the author clearly explores and focuses on the concept of suicide as a primary theme in A Gentle Creature. As a result of the authors vast knowledge of the facts about depression and suicide particularly among the younger generation, he presents clearly the concepts of suicide and in particular the psychology of tortured souls. He presents the happenings in the narrator’s life using his point of view and also presents his young wife’s problems. Throughout the novel as the narrator exercises dominance over his young wife, she becomes increasingly distant, a situation which is further propelled by the mistreatments that she suffers in her marriage to the narrator. Additionally the narrator barely talks to her. Unable to cope, the young wife resorts to killing herself seeing as it is her only way out. It can thus be argued that A Gentle Creature is the author’s attempt at exploring the dark concepts of suicide and depression.