The narrator is not a doctor, but the moment has come to give some account of Ivan's illness. He is on the very eve of an attack of brain fever. His mind is still working, because he still needs his wits. A gentleman is sitting on the sofa. He has the air of a poor relation who is received, and who has a lorgnette. If such gentlemen have children, the children are brought up at a distance, at some aunt's, and the fathers seem ashamed of the relationship. They lose sight of the children, though a birthday letter comes now and then. The visitor knows the evening. When you flew out at Alyosha under the lamp-post and shouted, You learnt it from him, how do you know that he visits me, you were thinking of me then.
I love men genuinely, he says. I have been greatly calumniated. Here, when I stay with people, I try to make myself agreeable. Ivan takes him for a hallucination. The visitor accepts the name and will not be reduced to it. Though I am your hallucination, yet, just as in a nightmare, I say original things which had not entered your head before. So I do not repeat your ideas. He talks of honours, and of being transformed into the soul of a merchant's wife weighing eighteen stone, who sets candles at God's shrine. Then even you do not believe in God? Ivan asks.
He has a story of a man condemned to walk a quadrillion kilometres in the dark. We have adopted the metric system, you know. When he has finished that quadrillion, the gates of heaven will be opened to him. Ivan has heard the story before. It was his. The visitor goes on as if the anecdote were his own. He bends, in another tale, to a grating, where a girl whispers her sin. Why, my daughter, have you fallen again already? cries the priest. O Sancta Maria, what do I hear. Not the same sin as before.
All things are lawful, and that is the end of it. The visitor finds this charming, and then he turns on it. If you want to swindle, why do you want a moral sanction for doing it? That is our modern Russian all over. He cannot bring himself to do a dirty thing without a principle. Ivan throws the glass. The visitor jokes that Luther threw an inkstand. Then there is a knock at the window. Ivan jumps up from the sofa. Do you hear? You had better open, cries the visitor. It is your brother Alyosha, with the most interesting and surprising news. Alyosha answers from the yard. He hanged himself. Come round to the steps. I will open at once. Ivan goes to open the door.
