Member-only story
Walter White’s Tragic Complexity
“Breaking Bad” and Dostoyevsky: moral transgression in the modern age
The television series Breaking Bad achieves a rare feat in modern storytelling: it creates a narrative that resonates with the psychological and moral complexity found in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s greatest works.
Through Walter White’s transformation from a mild-mannered chemistry teacher to a ruthless drug kingpin, the series explores themes that Dostoyevsky grappled with in novels like Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov: the nature of moral transgression, the psychology of pride, and the fragmentation of the self.
The Philosophy of Transgression
The philosophical underpinnings of Breaking Bad echo the moral inquiries of Dostoyevsky and Friedrich Nietzsche, particularly their explorations of life beyond conventional notions of good and evil.
Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch — the superior individual who transcends societal norms — manifests in both Walter White and Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov, characters who grapple with the boundaries of morality in pursuit of their ambitions.
In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov articulates his theory of extraordinary men, invoking Napoleon as a model: “I simply hinted that an…