Book 12 of The Brothers Karamazov takes place in a Russian courtroom where Dmitri is the center of a whirlwind of legal and public fervor. In his trial, lawyers battle to ascertain the guilt of Dmitri. The trial, and the spectacle surrounding it is meant, at least in context, to measure the goodness of Dmitri’s soul. However, S.L Frank, in The Meaning of Life, writes that the goodness and meaning of the soul are decided in a world completely outside of the material. In his trial, Dmitri is tested on the merits of essentially his entire life, with him having to justify almost every significant action that he had ever done. When Dmitri is questioned on whether he is guilty or not, he responds in a frenzied voice. He declares that “I intended to become an honest man ever after, precisely at the moment fate cut me down”. (702) It was at this moment that Dmitri should have most doubted his goodness as an individual. He was standing trial in a room of people who asserted that he was guilty of a crime that he did not commit, and he was being forced to plead his case to a crowd of onlookers. But instead of losing his faith in the world, he realized that his faith and his meaning came from a place completely outside of the world, and he was instead impervious to the challenges the trial was throwing at him. S.L Frank describes the way in which a frenzied world can attempt to tear down the individual. Frank, speaking of the ways in which faith can be found in the face of a loss of meaning in the world, says “Only by going beyond the limits of the world can we find the eternal foundation on which it is grounded. In abiding in the world, we are captured by it; and together with it we stagger and whirl in a meaningless vortex.” (Frank, 100). Dmitri, in the scene, is experiencing the vortex that Frank describes, with all of it especially being meaningless given his innocence. However, being presented with this materialistic storm of meaninglessness allows Dmitri to see into a more foundational goodness that exists outside of the material world. More than being a foundational goodness, the “foundation” of meaning itself, according to Frank, is not found anywhere in the material world at all, and is instead a completely immaterial phenomena. He goes further in describing the immaterial nature being a goodness that has almost no relation to the physical world. He says

“that the “meaning of life” is a good which surpasses all other human goods, that the genuine acquisition of this meaning is the acquisition of a treasure which immeasurably enriches the human soul”. (98) Dmitri is the ultimate example of a character that finds the foundation that Frank talks about. In every sense, Dmitri should be foundation-less during his trial, with his entire life being upended. However, needing a foundation to latch on to, and in desperation, Dmitri finds his own personal redemption far from the courtroom but instead somewhere beyond the physical world.