Not P but DFW: the implications of a human Christ

Mike Jing gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com
Wed Feb 11 16:01:38 UTC 2026


The following excerpt is from David Foster Wallace's *Joseph Frank's
Dostoevsky*:

Not surprisingly, FMD’s exact beliefs are idiosyncratic and complicated,
and Joseph Frank is thorough and clear and detailed in explaining their
evolution through the novels’ thematics (as in, e.g., the toxic effects of
egoistic atheism on the Russian character in Notes and C&P; the deformation
of Russian passion by worldly Europe in The Gambler; and, in The Idiot’s
Myshkin and The Brothers Karamazov’s Zossima, the implications of a human
Christ subjected literally to nature’s physical forces, an idea central to
all the fiction Dostoevsky wrote after seeing Holbein the Younger’s “Dead
Christ” at the Basel Museum in 1867).

What does the word "implication" mean here exactly?


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