Ivan Karamazov’s Meth Lab: Dostoevsky’s Theology in Breaking Bad

In a modern media industry driven by box office profits and Netflix streaming numbers, it is difficult to find movies and television shows that deserve classification as art. After all, most screenwriters and showrunners are forced to think as businesspeople rather than artists, selling their stories to the highest bidder. But even these days, every now and then someone will write a television show that really is art—the kind of carefully crafted masterpiece that deserves a second look, and a third, and a fourth. One of these shows is Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad.

Although Breaking Bad did not receive noteworthy ratings when it first began to air, its popularity has only increased over time. When Rolling Stone ranked the top 100 television shows, they listed Breaking Bad as number three. A groundbreaking achievement, the show has been the subject of everything from social media memes to serious academic scholarship.

To what does Breaking Bad owe its success? It would be no use to point out the tight plotting or fully fleshed characters. Far better critics than I have praised the show’s technical execution. Instead, what intrigues me about the show is the rooted depth of its truthfulness, the sincerity of its raw depiction of the human condition. Breaking Bad comprises an compelling artistic achievement not because of anything novel in its storytelling, but rather because of its ability to draw from the wisdom of classical works. In its nuanced exposition of the problem of suffering, Breaking Bad adopts and reflects the theology of one of the greatest works of literature ever written: Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.

What About the Children?

The Brothers Karamazov follows three brothers: Dmitri, the passionate hedonist; Ivan, the tortured atheist; and Alyosha, the young monk-in-training. Among the intricately interwoven plotlines of the long novel, one of the most compelling is the internal conflict of Ivan Karamazov, who cannot bring himself to serve the God of the Russian Orthodox Church because of the weight of human suffering.

Ivan outlines the reasons for his torment in a chapter aptly titled “Rebellion.” In this chapter, Ivan begins opening up to Alyosha, who so far has only been able to guess at the reasons for his older brother’s unhappiness. Careful and guarded as always, Ivan begins this famous chapter with a confession: that he “could never understand how one can love one’s neighbors.” It’s easy enough, Ivan claims, to love humanity at a distance—to love humankind in general. But as soon as you get close enough to touch, to see someone’s flaws on display, Ivan contends that real love becomes impossible. “For anyone to love a man, he must be hidden,” Ivan argues, “for as soon as he shows his face, love is gone.”

This is just a prelude to Ivan’s main point. He intends to talk about the problem of suffering, but he will not speak about the suffering of adults; instead, Ivan focuses on the suffering of children. He offers two reasons for narrowing the scope of his discussion to children: first, that “children can be loved even at close quarters, even when they are dirty, even when they are ugly.” No one ever argues that the torment of a child is justified. No one ever shakes their head and secretly thinks the child deserved it. His second reason is that the children are innocent in a way that grown-ups never are. According to Ivan, the grown-ups have a “compensation,” which is that “they’ve eaten the apple” and brought the weight of human suffering upon themselves. “But the children haven’t eaten anything,” Ivan says, “and are so far innocent.”

Of course, Ivan does not actually think that adults deserve all the suffering that they endure—merely that it is often difficult to fully appreciate the problem of suffering when speaking about adults. According to Ivan, this is because adults are so often unlovable, especially at close quarters. Ivan’s decision to focus on children combats a certain argument that is sometimes presented, in certain circles, as a resolution of the problem of suffering. This argument holds that the problem of suffering is an illusion, that there is no problem at all because all humans are totally depraved and equally worthy of eternal torment; in other words, no one ever suffers unjustly. It is possible, perhaps, to make this argument about adults and get away with it. It is not possible to do so in the case of children, who are so unquestionably innocent, and so it is on the topic of children that Ivan builds his argument.

But as it turns out, Ivan’s case is less an argument than it is a series of anecdotes that Ivan has collected, each one more horrifying and disturbing than the last, about the suffering of children. He tells Alyosha about a group of Turkish soldiers who shoot an infant in the head at point-blank; parents who smear their tiny toddler in excrement and force her to sleep in the doghouse during a freezing Russian winter; a general who orders his hounds to tear an eight-year-old boy to pieces.

Ivan speaks with a tortured, almost cruel fervor as he builds to his climax:

I took the case of children only to make my case clearer. Of the other tears of humanity with which the earth is soaked from its crust to its center, I will say nothing. I have narrowed my subject on purpose…. I must have justice, or I will destroy myself. And not justice in some remote infinite time and space, but here on earth, and that I could see myself…. Surely I haven’t suffered, simply that I, my crimes and my sufferings, may manure the soil of the future harmony for somebody else. I want to see with my own eyes the hind lie down with the lion and the victim rise up and embrace his murderer. I want to be there when every one suddenly understands what it has all been for. All the religions of the world are built on this longing, and I am a believer. But then there are the children, and what am I to do about them?

This problem—the problem of suffering, encapsulated in the suffering of children—is the problem from which Ivan cannot escape, and the problem which prevents him from serving Alyosha’s God. It is not that Ivan does not believe in God, only that he cannot believe that God is ultimately powerful, ultimately loving, and yet is somehow also willing to build his kingdom upon the backs of suffering children. Ivan admits that perhaps God will reveal some kind of answer at the end of time—an answer that will mend all broken hearts, that will right all wrongs, that will explain what the suffering was all for—but he protests that no resolution can possibly satisfy the demands of justice because the children have already been tortured. What good is hell? What good is vengeance? The tears of the children cannot be atoned for, cannot be undone. If the suffering of children is necessary to bring about the eternal harmony at the end of time, then Ivan says he is not interested in the eternal harmony. There is no end, Ivan argues, great enough to justify such a means.

At the end of this chapter, Alyosha presents no counterargument. How can he? Ivan’s tortured rationality requires an answer far more eloquent than argument. But before we turn to Alyosha’s answer, let us pause to consider what is perhaps the greatest masterpiece of serial cinema ever made: Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad.

Ivan Karamazov’s Meth Lab

In five seasons, AMC’s Breaking Bad tells the story of Walter White, a middle-aged high school chemistry teacher who is diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. Afraid of leaving his family behind with no money to live on, Walt recruits his former student Jesse Pinkman to help him start an underground business cooking and selling crystal meth. As it turns out, Walt’s intelligence and chemistry knowledge make him the best cook that the seedy underworld of Albuquerque, New Mexico has ever seen—and a target for the kingpins who already rule the local drug dealing scene.

Like Ivan, this show is concerned with both the depth of human suffering and the awful, astounding lengths that human beings will take to destroy one another. But even more remarkably, Gilligan profoundly echoes Ivan Karamazov in the way that he makes his point about the injustice of suffering not through the pain of his adult characters (who, frankly, often deserve what comes to them), but through the suffering of children.

Indeed, this argument is baked into the premise of the series. Walter White’s primary reason for becoming a drug dealer is his fear that his wife and children will suffer when he dies. As a chemistry teacher, Walt has no money to leave his family when (presumably) his lung cancer finally kills him. He fears that both his teenage son, who already suffers from cerebral palsy, and his unborn daughter will struggle without a father to provide for them—and so he turns to dealing meth as the only way to leave an inheritance behind for them.

Besides this structural element, we find another example of Gilligan’s emphasis on suffering children in Walt’s partner Jesse Pinkman, whose endearing youthfulness and moral compass mark him, in many ways, as the show’s emotional core. Although Walt initially disdains Jesse as a good-for-nothing who couldn’t even pass high school chemistry, he eventually comes to care for and treat Jesse like one of his own children. To Jesse, who has a turbulent relationship with his own family, Walt becomes something of a surrogate (if deeply flawed) father. Indeed, there is something childlike about Jesse, who never stops calling Walt “Mr. White,” despite the fact that it has been years since Walt taught him chemistry.

But although Jesse is willing to help Walt cook and distribute the meth for him, he also possesses a sensitivity to evil that stands out among his degenerate colleagues. In particular, Jesse responds in horror and grief every time that his partnership with Walt inflicts suffering—intentionally or unintentionally—upon a child.

It is, perhaps, ironic that Walt’s secret life as a drug dealer—which he initially undertakes in order to protect his own children from harm—so often ends up inflicting pain and suffering on children who are merely innocent bystanders. Key examples include 11-year-old Tomas, who is first used as a hit man and then murdered by drug dealers, 6-year-old Brock, who is poisoned and nearly dies in the hospital, and 14-year-old Drew, who is shot because he happens to witness Walt and his employees robbing a train.

Maybe even more telling is the fact that although Gilligan kills off many of the adult characters with hardly a second thought, he presents each of these events involving children as a crucial plot device, rather than a throwaway casualty. Each suffering child marks a pivotal moment in the plot, a moment whose repercussions echo throughout the narrative as a whole. Every time that an innocent child is caught in the crossfire, the main characters must wrestle with the guilt and moral consequences—but none more intensely than Walt’s partner Jesse.

Jesse has a soft spot for children. In one early episode, Walt sends Jesse to retrieve money from a drug-addicted couple who ripped off one of Walt’s distributors. But upon entering their home with a loaded gun, Jesse finds out that the couple have a young, neglected son. Throughout the episode, he struggles to do his job while simultaneously protecting the child from both physical harm and the psychological trauma of seeing his parents being threatened. But when the boy’s mother, angry and high, murders his father, Jesse calls 9-1-1 and quickly takes the boy outside so that he won’t see.

“Hey, you remember peekaboo?” he asks the boy. “Can you go peekaboo like this? Can you keep your eyes closed?…. It’s a little game we’re gonna play, okay?” Jesse leaves the boy wrapped in a blanket on the front steps of their house, begging him, “Just don’t go back inside.”

In his compassion for children, Jesse embodies Ivan Karamazov’s point that the children “haven’t eaten anything,” that they deserve to be protected from even the knowledge of the suffering inflicted by the sins of their fathers. Instinctively, Jesse understands that he must shield the boy from the gruesome results of his parents’ crimes. The murder itself is disturbing, of course—but not nearly as disturbing as the torment inflicted on a neglected child who doesn’t know any better, who can’t escape the consequences of his parents’ actions.

Throughout the series, Jesse’s empathy for children clashes violently with his choice of occupation. Whenever Walt or one of his employees makes a decision that brings about the suffering of a child, Jesse responds in anger and sorrow. He weeps on behalf of the sins committed by those around him. He experiences the guilt and shame of their actions as acutely as if he himself had harmed the children. Like Ivan, Jesse understands that pain is an inevitable consequence of human evil. After all, he has no moral qualms with cooking and selling meth to adults who have the agency to face the consequences of their own bad decisions. But the children have nothing to do with it, and they suffer anyway, and Jesse does not know what to do about them.

The existential vision of Breaking Bad is practically inseparable from the philosophy of Ivan Karamazov: There is an evil in humanity so selfish, so profound, that it results in unimaginable suffering. When that suffering falls back upon the perpetrators, the murderers, the drug dealers, we feel no sympathy for them. But then there are the children—the Tomases, Brocks, and Drews of the world—who did nothing to deserve the knife, the poison, the bullet. The children suffer not for anything they have done, but for the evil of others. When Gilligan highlights the suffering of children, he compels us in turn to ask Ivan’s climactic question: What are we going to do about them?

Answering Ivan

Although it takes him over 800 pages to do so, Dostoevsky answers this question. And, against all odds, so does Walter White.

As mentioned before, Alyosha offers Ivan no rational argument because he has no rational argument to give. Everything Ivan says is true: children do suffer through no fault of their own, it is unjust, and it is impossible to imagine what kind of eternal harmony could possibly make all the suffering worth it. Alyosha thus responds not in words, but in actions.

Throughout the novel, Alyosha meets a number of schoolboys in his town. These schoolboys are young and impoverished, often (like the neglected child that Jesse tries to protect) suffering the consequences of their parents’ actions. But Alyosha befriends them, loves them, and teaches them to serve God and do good. While Ivan laments the suffering of children in general, Alyosha works to save the particular children right in front of him. Alyosha’s answer to Ivan’s argument is to acknowledge that although we do not understand on a grand scale why children suffer, we may yet hope for a justification that we do not yet understand and cannot even imagine from our limited human perspective. In the words of Dostoevsky, we must believe “that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood they’ve shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.”

In the meantime, Alyosha might say, we cannot atone for the suffering of children in general. We cannot save every child. But we can love and save the particular children in front of us.

Studied from any angle, Walter White is an antihero. He lies to his wife, kills his enemies, and causes untold suffering to countless others. In his desperate quest to protect his own children from pain, he causes the pain of other innocent children. He even turns his back on Jesse, who has become like a son to him, handing him over to be tortured and enslaved by a ruthless gang.

But Walt has some humanity left, and when he understands in the end that he is really, truly dying, he sets out to make just a few things right. In the final episode of the series, he infiltrates the compound where Jesse is being imprisoned and kills Jesse’s captors, freeing him. In the process, Walt himself is shot and killed.

This scene offers a taste of a resolution to the problem of suffering. No matter how hard Walt tries to control his life and shape his destiny, he is powerless to stop the cancer, just as he is powerless to guarantee an inheritance for his children or to make his wife accept his actions. Throughout the series, Walt grapples with the injustice of suffering in a world where he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer before he did anything to deserve it, where he watches his son struggle daily with the effects of cerebral palsy, where he earns a paltry salary as a high school teacher when his genius should be earning billions. In the words of Ivan Karamazov, all Walt knows “is that there is suffering and that there are none guilty.” It isn’t fair, it’s never been fair, and Walt knows it.

But despite himself, Walt comes to love the young, enthusiastic, childlike Jesse Pinkman like one of his own children, and that love drives Walter White, sinner that he is, to the same answer that Alyosha gives Ivan. He cannot purge the senseless suffering out of humanity any more than he can purge the evil out of his own soul, but he can take one step toward redeeming the darkness within. He cannot save the children, but he can save one child—his child.

And in doing so, perhaps he can cover a multitude of sins.

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