While our difficulty in interpreting Nastas'ia Filippovna is primarily a result of her absence from the text, the figure of Prince Myshkin, in spite of his near-constant foregrounding in the narrative, proves equally problematic, as the contradictory interpretations of him discussed in the introduction attest. He is a complex creation, unknowable and indefinable, conceived as an ideal, but evidently falling some way short of being ‘Prince Christ’ (IX, 246, 249) in the final version of the novel. Another appellation in the notebook, the open-ended ‘The prince is a sphinx’ (IX, 248) is perhaps the best description of the hero, and the overriding problem of the novel is the question of how to solve the ‘riddle’ his character represents. The aim of this chapter is not to examine the character of Prince Myshkin as such, but to look beyond the traditional axis of the saintly and the malign, in order to see how his personality and vision changes. In order to establish why the prince's fate becomes so closely bound up with Nastas'ia Filippovna's, and the effect of this on his personality, this chapter will examine the foundations of his script and the ways in which it changes for the worse during the course of the novel, concentrating on Myshkin's vision of a ‘higher reality’, its origin in his epileptic fits, and its connections with his fundamental ideas (‘Compassion is the most important and the only law of human existence’; ‘humility is a terrible force’; ‘the world will be saved by beauty’; ‘there shall be time no longer’ (VIII, 192; 329; 317; 189)).