A dostoevskian dialogue structure for the presentation of the unconscious

In this article, I demonstrate that in Crime and Punishment (1866) and Demons (1872), Dostoevsky uses a specific type of dialogue-which I term “the about-face dialogue”-to present the displacement of a young man's unconscious rage against his mother on to society while hiding it from the awareness of both protagonist and reader. In this type of dialogue, the protagonist interprets his interlocutor's unwittingly ambiguous word or phrase as a scathing rebuke of his rage against his mother, and his reaction constitutes a displacement of this rage on to the outside world. Our awareness of the interplay between the unconscious and the outside world in this type of dialogue enables us to understand the protagonist's sudden about-face from compassion to apathy, or even animosity, which is incomprehensible on the purely rational level.