Thoughts on the first half of The Brothers Karamazov

At the half-way point in Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamozov (1880; his last novel) and am surprised on this (re)reading to see how little FD cares about getting a plot into gear; through these long first chapters (total +300 pp) he does a lot of character delineation, particularly of the youngest brother, Alyosha, who differs in temperament from his two brothers and their father (Fyodor). But throughout these pages it seems that FD's greater impulse is to expound some of his views on religion, faith, prayer, devotion. Compare this work w/ C&P, which is plot-driven and gets to the dramatic highlight, the murder of the pawnbroker, in the first 50 or so pp. In some ways, TBsK is the more profound novel, a novel of ideas, but it does feel that at the mid-point that it's time to get the plot off the ground! Not that there aren't some great sections in the first half. Notably, Alyosha's encounter w/ the group of schoolboys bullying the child from a severely impoverished and sickly family; this element of the plot is left hanging at the mid-point, but will become significant in the second half of the novel. The most famous section in the first half of the novel, probably in the whole novel, is brother Ivan's account to Alyosha of a "poem" he's writing, The Grand Inquisitor - a narrative about a leader of the Inquisition imprisoning and condemning a man who may be the 2nd coming of Jesus; this chapter has sometimes been broken out and published as a novella. To me it feels kinds of over-wrought and doesn't hold my interest as well as the "contemporary" passages - the best of which, I think, come in the dying elder's (Zosima's) account to his life, in particular his account of the disturbed older man who confessed that he had committed murder and never been accused or caught. The man asks the then-young Zosima whether he should confess to his crime and thereby ruin the lives of his wife and young daughters. We can see how this is a variant on Raskolnikov's crime in C&P: In that case, the failure to commit the perfect crime and the ensuing guilt and fear. The treatment of the theme in TBsK is more powerful and unusual: When must we own up to our crimes and guilt? To whose benefit? Toward what end? Finally, though the set-up includes many such passages that are not strictly necessary for the novel as a whole (it was published in installments over several years, I think) the elements all work together in establishing the brothers and their father as dynamic, drive, obsessed men whom we know will come into deadly rivalry, particularly in conflict over women and in an Oedipal struggle for power.