BETWEEN METAPHYSICAL VERTIGO AND ONTOLOGICAL DERELICTION: THE BAROQUE DRAMA OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS, SPIRITUAL DISQUIETUDE, AND EXISTENTIAL RUPTURE IN MURPHY AND THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV
BETWEEN METAPHYSICAL VERTIGO AND ONTOLOGICAL DERELICTION: THE BAROQUE DRAMA OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS, SPIRITUAL DISQUIETUDE, AND EXISTENTIAL RUPTURE IN MURPHY AND THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV

Summary/Abstract: This inquiry advances a deeply immersive, almost tactile re-reading of Murphy by Samuel Beckett and The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, not as distant literary artefacts suspended in historical abstraction, but as profoundly human documents of anguish, lucidity, and metaphysical fragility. The study situates both works within a shared experiential horizon of spiritual disquietude, existential vertigo, and ontological fracture, where the human being is perpetually caught between the yearning for transcendence and the quiet, often merciless withdrawal of meaning from the world. Although Beckett’s austere, fragmented, and almost ascetically reduced modernism appears, at first glance, to inhabit a universe entirely alien to Dostoevsky’s exuberant, stormy, and polyphonic moral cosmos, a more intimate reading reveals a subterranean kinship. Beneath stylistic divergence lies a shared sensitivity to the trembling condition of being human: a condition marked by vulnerability, excessive awareness, and an almost painful capacity for reflection. Both authors, in their own radically different tonalities, give voice to a humanity that no longer inhabits certainty, but rather endures consciousness as a form of burden—beautiful, corrosive, and inescapable.At the centre of both novels stands the figure of the hyper-lucid individual, a being who no longer simply lives, but endlessly interprets its own living. This heightened lucidity, far from being a gift of clarity, becomes instead a wound: a state of emotional and metaphysical overexposure. Murphy and Ivan Karamazov thus emerge as two deeply human, almost fragile embodiments of existential rupture. Murphy withdraws into the intimate, claustrophobic interiority of thought, seeking refuge from the noise and weight of external existence, as though consciousness itself could be folded inward until the world becomes bearable. Ivan, by contrast, moves in the opposite direction: he expands thought until it collides violently with the moral structure of reality, revolting against a cosmos that permits suffering, especially the suffering of the innocent, and thereby destabilising the very possibility of divine order. In both figures, freedom reveals itself not as liberation, but as a strangely oppressive excess of possibility. It becomes a vertigo rather than a gift, a dizzying openness that does not console but destabilises. The human being, confronted with too much awareness and too many irreconcilable meanings, discovers that freedom can lead not to salvation, but to fragmentation, paralysis, and a profound sense of metaphysical homelessness. The study further argues that suffering, in both Beckett and Dostoevsky, cannot be reduced to mere circumstance or psychological disturbance. Instead, it acquires an ontological density: it becomes something rooted in the very structure of human consciousness. To be human is not simply to encounter suffering, but to perceive it, to internalise it, to allow it to reverberate through thought itself. Suffering arises not only from what happens to the individual, but from what the individual is capable of understanding. The mind becomes both the site and the amplifier of anguish, transforming reflection into a slow, almost imperceptible form of erosion.From a stylistic perspective, the contrast between Dostoevsky’s expansive polyphony and Beckett’s radical minimalism should not obscure their deeper convergence. Dostoevsky’s world is inhabited by voices that overflow, collide, confess, and accuse, creating a kind of moral turbulence in which truth is never singular but perpetually contested. Beckett, on the other hand, strips discourse down to its barest residue, allowing silence, repetition, and exhaustion to speak where language begins to fail. Yet both aesthetic universes are, at their core, haunted by the same intuition: that language is insufficient before the enormity of existence, and that human speech can only circle, never fully capture, the abyss it seeks to name. Within this shared metaphysical landscape, faith and nihilism cease to function as simple opposites and instead appear as intertwined responses to the same wound of existence. Dostoevsky’s universe remains haunted by God even in rebellion; Ivan’s refusal is never purely absence, but a form of agonised dialogue with the divine. Beckett, by contrast, writes from a world where transcendence has already receded, leaving behind a quiet devastation of meaning, populated by gestures that persist even when justification has vanished. Yet even in this stripped world, Murphy’s withdrawal can be read as a deep human gesture: not indifference, but a desperate attempt to preserve a minimal form of inner coherence.Ultimately, this study suggests that both novels function as an elegiac meditation on what it means to be human in a world that no longer offers stable metaphysical grounding. The human being appears as a liminal creature, suspended between incompatible poles: longing and absence, clarity and collapse, hope and silence. In their convergence, Murphy and The Brothers Karamazov articulate a shared truth that is at once fragile and relentless: that existence is not defined by resolution, but by the persistence of questioning; not by final answers, but by the dignified, often painful endurance of uncertainty itself.

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