Narrator

Perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind when reading "The Grand Inquisitor" is that the long speech is spoken by a character in a novel. It should be obvious, but it is easy to forget, that this is not an argumentative essay by Dostoevsky, in which the ideas expressed can be traced directly back to the mind of the author. Rather, a fictional character named Ivan tells a story, and within that story another fictional character called the Grand Inquisitor says what he thinks about God and man. The fact that there are multiple levels of narration does not mean that the ideas expressed by the Grand Inquisitor are not Dostoevsky's; it simply means that they need not be.

For the first several pages, the reader of the short story does not know who is speaking. The narrator states that God has come to Earth to...