In The Idiot, Dostoyevsky does not use a multitude of literary devices, but the few he does use are used forcefully and throughout the entire work. Through an interesting, changing point of view, flashbacks and foreshadowings, and a masterful use of a stream of consciousness technique, Dostoyevsky uses few literary techniques, but he uses them in a beautiful way, pushing them all to their full potential.
Dostoyevsky uses a very unique writing style, suddenly at random intervals breaking away from the storyline and going into 1st person narrative. While this was initially distracting and frankly a little annoying, it grew on me, and as I said in an earlier post, it became almost comforting to me. Having breaks in this massive text for the author to provide me with some words of encouragement, I soon came to enjoy and look forward to these breaks in the story and the little check-ins from Dostoyevsky. He uses these brief story breaks to employ some of the only literary devices in the novel, as the foreshadowings and flashbacks would be presented by Dostoyevsky himself. This also makes interpreting Dostoyevsky's literary devices a lot easier. You can trust that the text is trustworthy if the author himself is the one explaining it.
In addition to this interesting point of view style and the scarce but effective devices, Dostoyevsky uses a very convincing and realistic stream of consciousness technique. His writing style shows how jumbled and incoherent thought processes can be, with frequent breaks in dialogue and narrative, using dashes and parentheses. This writing style helps the reader get directly into the characters' and narrator's head, as you are able to follow their thoughts and the frantic way they deal with whatever is thrown their way.
Dostoyevsky does not use many literary devices, relying on multiple strong characters and a beautifully complex and layered plot to carry his story along. That being said, Dostoyevsky's use of stream of consciousness, flashbacks and foreshadowings, and point of view are used masterfully, helping the reader understand all the complexity in front of them.
I think one of the reasons I struggled so much with the book was because, as I noticed about 350 pages in, so much of the book is developed through dialogue. There is little narration for large chunks of the book, which means that the reader needs to make sense of the interactions between characters on their own. While I don't think I would mind this in a contemporary novel, I struggled with it in this book.
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