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Crime and Punishment - Part 2

#179: Oct. - Dec. 2021 (Fiction)
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Harry Marks
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Re: Crime and Punishment - Part 2

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Robert Tulip wrote: Mon Jan 10, 2022 10:22 pm Dostoyevsky has Raskolnikov skate as close to confession as possible while concealing his guilt, leading Zametov to express impatient perplexity at his mysterious remarks, which the reader knows reflect this upwelling desire to account for his hideous murder.
I found this to be the most disturbing part of the book. I took it that it reflected Dostoevsky's actual experience, perhaps around his gambling addiction. All the rationalizations and exaggerated claims to superiority amount to nothing, and in some sense are revealed to be baseless. The truth is he cares what others think of him and cares about his own opinion of himself, despite fantasies of constructing his own independent values.

I like your terminology here, "desire to account for his hideous murder." An account, a narrative, a semblance of coherence, is vitally important to our identity and our sense of purpose. Incoherent "upwellings" from our subconscious are very disturbing and Raskolnikov is in the highly uncomfortable position of realizing that his conception before the crime does not account for his actual behavior, nor do his current feelings match with the feelings he might have expected (e.g. triumph, satisfaction, moving on to the next thing in his life, etc.) according to the narrative he had followed in getting into this predicament.

This colossal mismatch, whether one calls it lunacy, foolishness or just inconsistency over time, strikes me as the most insightful part of the book. The plot, such as it is, is hardly advancing, but the flirtation with confession and self-abandon drew me in like nothing in the plot did. I find myself wondering, "who is this Raskolnikov and where did his former grandiose dreams come from and where have they gone now?"

As literature is supposed to do, it raises more questions than it can answer. The very improbability of how R turned out, compared to the narrative we were led to accept before, lends a lot of credibility to the account, in my mind. I guess I could say the incoherence is felt by me as incoherence, and this adds to the sense that a real person is in the situation.
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