Magical Realism in "Bobok" Anonymous College

In his short story Bobok, Fyodor Dostoevsky provides a perfect example of one of his favorite devices, magical realism, which paints a realist view of the modern world with the addition of magical elements. The idea that a man might lie down in a graveyard and begin to hear voices below—from the bodies buried in the earth—would be entirely implausible if not for the way in which Dostoevsky carries it out. The ridiculous premise of the story is tempered by details which seem plausible, such that the reader need only accept one magical element in order to believe the rest, as opposed to entirely fantastical stories which present so many impossibilities that one cannot take them seriously at all.

The primary characteristic of Dostoevsky’s magical realism is that even the fantastical part of the story is not outlandish. With a good argument, one could be convinced (at least in Dostoevsky’s age) that the human mind still functions for a time after a person has died. After all, if a chicken can live for 18 months without a head, why is it so preposterous to think that the human brain dies at a different pace than the body? Dostoevsky even lays out an explanation of the phenomenon when new bodies arrive in the graveyard and do not...