Kirilov

What do you think about Kirilov's idea of being a God?

If I were an atheist I would be inclined to agree; however, I am not.

Edit: I would agree; however, if I was an atheist I would rather live and enjoy life under the illusion of freedom rather than die making the only free action.

I think it was easy to say for Kirilov: ''I can kill myself so it makes me like a God!'', actually without killing himself, Kirilov wouldn't prove anything, even not to him self, I think that Stavrogin, Shatov and others were totally irrelevant, he needed to prove it to himself.

I certainly agree that the others were irrelevant to him and his cause. His conversations with Pyotr Stepanovitch drove me a little nuts though. He had agreed to whatever Pyotr's time frame was and yet insisted that he had done no such thing and yet sat around waiting for Pyotr's signal. There were times when he was going on and on about his theory of becoming god through killing himself that I was thinking he would show himself more of a god if he did it on his own timetable and without so much talking. :p

In this way there will be no post mortem questions : Why did he did that?
Only admiration or, in my opinion; compassion for such a waste of life.

I don't know that there would be admiration. No one in that cell is going to admire him because of the connection to Shatov's murder and Poytr was the only one who seemed ok about that..oh, and that soldier, Enkel? I think that was his name. Even compassion, confessing to such a crime is going to take away some of that compassion, turning it into shock and disgust. I think there would've been more compassion if they thought it was just a disturbed, unhappy young man overwhelmed by life rather than someone who had commited murder and was too much of a coward to accept the consequences.

I think it's really difficult to analyze motives for suicide without destroying the mystery that is each human person. How far can we go into anyone else's mind? What we know about other people is more to be admired than "understood".

Although I definitely cannot approve of suicide, I agree with those who believe that anyone who commits suicide has to first go through insanity, no matter how close it is to death. But, when I think of the people who jumped off the World Trade Center, I imagine I might have done the same thing since the only other alternative was to bear up with 500 degrees of heat. In some sense, perhaps, a person who commits suicide is choosing the alternative that is least painful.

If there is such a thing as a person who freely chooses suicide, without any true loss of freedom (e.g., through excessive pain), I think that such a person necessarily does not believe in God. If I realized what comes after a free choice against God's laws would be infinitely more painful that whatever I am suffering in this life, I could not take my own life.

Of course, the only exceptions would be for those persons who, like the WTC victims, were "driven" to do something they would never have dreamed of doing, whether or not they believed in God or in eternal truths.

In the case of The Possessed, I think we are dealing with some nihilists, for whom suicide would never be censured as an option.