Confessions of a dying man - in Dostoevsky's The Idiot

The young man dying of consumption, Ippolite, continues reading aloud his confessional essay, his account of his life, over three chapters in Dostoevsky's "The Idiot," essentially boring to death everyone at the all-night party - but not boring us: this interpolated confession is one of the oddities that we come to expect and appreciate in Dostoevsky's fiction, much like The Grand Inquisitor episode in TBK; in fact, in the ruthless examination of his morally ambiguous life, Ippolite is like a younger (but more mature, in the literary sense) version of D's Underground Man. The key to his confession is that he did and said a horrible thing to a young father grieving the death of his infant - presumably, the infant died of cold because the father could not afford to provide enough heat for his apartment - and Ippolite blamed the father. The father - Surikov? - politely escorted him out of the house: Go, sir!. Ip. claims to have no feelings about this, but then recounts how he helped a poor medical student work his way out of poverty, by calling on some old school connections: he also claims to have no feeling about his rescue or we could say his "saving" of the medical student and his family. Ip. is acting Christlike, toward the medical student, and perhaps symbolically resurrecting the dead baby (one of his dreams also suggests this). But then Ip. describes the painting of Christ taken from the cross that he saw in Rogozhin's house - the same painting that the Prince saw and was moved by. Ip. explains the strangeness of the painting: what kind of world are we in, what are the forces of nature in this world, that could batter a man's body so? Is it enough to challenge one's faith? For Ip., it is - it's his avenue into atheism and nihilism. That leads him to ponder his own suicide - and the thought of becoming a mass murderer so as to spend his last days more comfortably in prison. He ends his narrative, tries unsuccessfully to shoot himself - which leads us back to the Prince: it's not toward dawn, there's the possibility he may yet be challenged in a duel, various suitors are turning to him for help and advice: they now see him as a sage, and, again - though they don't state this - as a Christ-like figure of suffering and wisdom. He falls asleep in the park and is startled awake by the arrival of Aglaya - his true love interest, though how this will play off against his passion for the fully deranged Nastasya is unclear.