Xavier Ray > Recent Status Updates

Absolutely love Dostoyevsky’s pacing and rhythm.

What stands out here is how quickly Raskolnikov’s compassion turns to disgust. The letter fills him with guilt, and the drunk girl in the street triggers the same outrage—but it collapses just as fast. Dostoevsky shows a man who wants to be good yet doubts goodness itself. The policeman is secondary; the real conflict is in his mind, where every moral impulse argues with itself.

One thing the film leaves out that stays with me from the novel is Moss picking up the young hitchhiker. That short stretch of road feels like the last quiet space in the book, a pause where two people talk about luck, time, and the idea that “yesterday is all that does count.” It humanizes Moss right before fate closes in. Without it, the story loses a flicker of tenderness that makes his end even more tragic.

It’s the clearest proof of his genius: that through absolute restraint, he can make a few quiet sentences contain the death of a man, and the indifference of the universe that keeps turning after him.

In the scene where Chigurh kills Wells, McCarthy distills the entire human condition into a single act. Fear, memory, violence, and time all unfold with the precision of ritual. He doesn’t describe death so much as enact it—language turning into fate, grammar becoming judgment.

Violence becomes law, chance becomes theology. The sentences are stripped to wire, but they hum with moral voltage. You can feel the grandeur of Blood Meridian distilled into silence. It’s literature because it shows that meaning can collapse and still sound beautiful on the way down.

What makes No Country for Old Men literary isn’t the plot—it’s how McCarthy turns pulp into parable. Anton Chigurh isn’t just a killer; he’s Judge Holden rewritten for the modern world, the mythic made procedural.

Wow! The film stuck so close the book it’s impressive. I guess it was a screenplay at first

McCarthy’s intercalary sections from Sheriff Bell carry the rhythm of an old Western voiceover, guiding you across the moral landscape without softening it. You can feel the weight of history pressing against the present, like one reel ending and another beginning. It’s cinematic and elegiac at once, and it’s what gives the book its strange pulse—half lament, half momentum.

This is where Dostoevsky’s genius really shows. Raskolnikov is both right and wrong, both sane and unraveling. His disgust for these “respectable” men says as much about his own pride and alienation as it does about their corruption. It’s a breathtakingly complex scene—one letter pulling him closer to the edge.

What’s striking is that he doesn’t even know them. Everything he believes about them comes straight from the letter and from his own imagination. But his instincts are sharp. He sees through the hypocrisy immediately, sensing how power and morality get twisted together in their world. At the same time, his reasoning already feels fevered. It’s hard to tell where his moral clarity ends and his paranoia begins.

Raskolnikov’s reaction might be my favorite psychological moment so far. The letter itself is full of love and hope, but it’s also painfully naïve. She tells him all about Dunya’s disgrace with her employer and this new engagement to Pyotr Petrovich Luzhin, as if it’s a happy turn of fate. Raskolnikov reads it like it’s a warning from hell. He’s furious, disgusted, protective, and ashamed all at once.

Damn! On a whim I picked this up and started reading it because I’m crazy and I haven’t been reading enough lately (currently reading Crime and Punishment after having just finished Disgrace, Blood Meridian and three other books in the last month). Anyway, I love Cormac!

It’s the moment where his pity turns to cynicism and then to a dangerous new idea. Really powerful scene that shows how his moral boundaries start to blur.

Just hit a fascinating turning point as Raskolnikov leaves the Marmeladovs. After leaving them a bit of money and feeling both pity and disgust, he suddenly flips into a kind of philosophical rebellion. He wonders out loud if all morality is just a set of fears imposed on us, and if that’s true, then maybe there are no barriers at all.

Marmeladov feels like a mirror of Raskolnikov—both men trapped between intellect and redemption, both convinced they’re beyond saving. The scene is chaotic, but it already carries the heartbeat of the novel.

He knows exactly how pitiful he is, but in his drunken haze he also imagines that God will forgive even him and Sonia before the proud and respectable people of the world. The rhythm of his speech is mesmerizing. He keeps shifting from shame to hope to wild exaltation, and it feels honest the whole time. It’s the first glimpse of Dostoevsky’s world in full: the poverty, the guilt, the desperate need for grace.

I just reached the scene in the tavern where Raskolnikov meets Marmeladov, and I was caught off guard by how sad and strange it is. The whole speech feels like a performance—half confession, half sermon. Marmeladov is a ruined civil servant who drinks away what little he earns, while his wife Katerina Ivanovna wastes away with consumption and his daughter Sonia has taken a “yellow ticket” to support them.

Just 10 pages in and Raskolinkov is already an amazing literary character from who to learn about human psychology

David’s life with the dogs is stripped of theory, stripped of ego; what’s left is service, silence, and a faint, hard-won humility—Coetzee’s last surviving language when intellect has failed.

By Chapter 16, the novel has gone quiet—its violence now an echo that seeps into everything. The father who once prized beauty and intellect now finds himself washing kennels and carrying bodies, and it’s in those silent acts that something like grace begins to flicker.

Coetzee shows that not all feeling is truth—only the kind we’re willing to live inside without turning it into a theory. Lucy endures the real; David abstracts it. One survives through feeling, the other hides in thought.

So when she says, “I don’t act in terms of abstractions,” she’s asserting something radical:
that no conceptual framework can contain or cleanse what has happened. She is refusing to let her experience become another moral parable for her father’s intellectual conscience.

For her, the violence was not symbolic or moral; it was physical, historical, and unfixable. To turn it into an abstraction—“a crime,” “an act of vengeance,” “a test”—would be to deny its immediacy, to appropriate it back into David’s world of thought where he remains in control.