After culling Doestoevsky's text for the few clues he gives into G-v's own character, the article compares the characters and narrative methods of G-v and Peter Verkhovensky in order to distinguish between their radically different motivations–giving us access to the diverging meaning behind each one's telling.

Even those who accept G-v as a single narrator come to the conclusion that he has invented much of the story, and is himself, like the character of Peter Stepanovich Verkhovensky, one of the novel's “devils.”“The Enigmatic G-v” examines these many interpretations, and confronts them with counterexamples that demonstrate why the novel is neither inconsistent nor ambivalent. The spectrum of responses from Dostoevsky critics includes some saying that the novel has “technical inconsistencies,” others claiming that there are in fact two narrators (the character G-v and a separate omniscient authorial narrator), and yet others developing the notion of an “ambivalent meaning” behind the text.

On the one hand he is profusely talkative and repeatedly justifies his position as narrator on the other, he reports scenes that he did not witness and could not have direct knowledge about, including what people say and even think. The chronicler-narrator of Dostoevsky's Demons, Anton Lavrentievich G-v, seems like an inscrutable and oscillatory storyteller.

Evil spirits dostoevsky