This book is concerned primarily with depicting Ivan's guilt and with detailing his duplicity in the murder of his father. Particularly, Dostoevsky emphasizes the three interviews with Smerdyakov (solving for the reader, on the plot level, the mystery of Fyodor's killer) and Ivan's conversation with his imaginary devil. Dostoevsky manipulates the attention of the reader away from the plot question of legal guilt and confronts him with the intricacies of Ivan's dilemma about metaphysical guilt.
Also in Book XI, Dostoevsky provides necessary background concerning what has happened during the two months that Dmitri has been in jail. It is most important to the author's total view that one know that Grushenka has lain ill following Dmitri's arrest. One of Dostoevsky's prime concepts, prominent in all his novels, is that crime (or involvement with crime) is often accompanied by illness. Besides Grushenka's falling ill after she realizes her role in the Karamazov crime, Ivan also falls desperately ill upon his realization of his involvement in the murder. Thus, in addition to coupling crime and illness, Dostoevsky is structuring a much more important tenet. Because Grushenka is ill and suffers, she becomes regenerated. Knowledge through suffering is one of the novel's prime equations. To underscore his presentation, Dostoevsky, as a contrast to the sensitive Grushenka, records the mincings of the whimsical and impish Lise. This young lady maintains that she needs to suffer in order to learn and that she likes to make other people suffer, but she is both shallow and superficial. She defines suffering, for example, as punishing children by eating pineapple compote before them. She punishes herself by slamming the door on her fingers!
This destructive girl turns Dostoevsky's theories inside out and delights in reviling everyone and everything. Her perversity functions as a vivid contrast to Grushenka's more healthy and sound soul.
