« Comprenez-vous, Monsieur… Car il faut que tout homme puisse aller quelque part »

The expression “« Comprenez-vous, Monsieur… Car il faut que tout homme puisse aller quelque part »” joins a question about having nowhere to go to the stark claim that every person needs somewhere to go. Introduced through a remembered exchange in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, it frames the novel’s concern with displacement and the need for refuge before the narrative turns to the deaths of the children.

Source and Form

The passage begins with a question addressed to a “Monsieur”: what does it mean to have nowhere left to go? That question comes back to the speaker’s mind from the previous day. The recollection then gives way to the answering principle, that every person must be able to go somewhere. The movement from a question of immediate deprivation to a general declaration makes the expression both intimate and aphoristic.

The words are attributed to Marmeladov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Their return is not presented as a newly occurring conversation: the speaker recalls having heard the question the day before. The quotation therefore brings a remembered literary voice into the novel’s present and makes the idea of having somewhere to go resonate beyond the original exchange.

Thematic Significance

The expression makes refuge a basic human necessity rather than a matter of comfort or privilege. Its emphasis is not simply on having a destination, but on the intolerable condition of having no place one can turn to. The insistence that this must be possible for every person gives the line an ethical force: exclusion and homelessness are rendered as violations of a fundamental need.

Placed near the opening, the remembered words establish a counterpoint to the account of the children’s deaths that follows. The epigraphic sequence first invokes a woman judged by an employer without regard for her own burdens, then recalls the question of having nowhere to go; the narrative immediately opens with a dead infant and a gravely injured child. Against these scenes of vulnerability, the expression offers no remedy, but supplies a measure by which isolation and dependence can be read. Its placement makes the need for a place in the world part of the novel’s initial moral frame.