What makes Dostoevsky different from every other novelist I've read is the way his characters argue. They don't argue like characters in novels — presenting positions that the plot will adjudicate. They argue like people who know the stakes are high and the argument might not be settled. Ivan Karamazov's challenge to Alyosha is not resolved in the novel. It's deepened.

This is the form of the novel's honesty. Dostoevsky doesn't use plot to settle the questions he's raised. He uses plot to intensify them and then to show what happens when you try to live as if they're settled. The murder in The Brothers Karamazov doesn't answer the theological question; it shows what the question looks like when it's embodied in a family.

Reading Dostoevsky convinced me that fiction could do philosophy without becoming didactic, which is a difficult thing to do and which most novels that try it fail at.