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Crime and Punishment

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

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Student Question

How does the symbolic 'death' in this passage from Crime and Punishment differ from Alyona and Lizaveta's murder, and why does it make Raskolnikov feel pardoned?

"'Yes … I’m covered with blood,' Raskolnikov said with a peculiar air; then he smiled, nodded and went downstairs. He walked down slowly and deliberately, feverish but not conscious of it, entirely absorbed in a new overwhelming sensation of life and strength that surged up suddenly within him. This sensation might be compared to that of a man condemned to death who has suddenly been pardoned."

Quick answer:

Raskolnikov feels temporarily pardoned by the death of Marmeladov because becoming a champion of the dead man's family allows him to feel heroic again. This is a desperate delusion he concocts to deny the recognition forced on him by the murders of Alonya and Lizaveta, that he is not a superman but a failure and murderer who is justly suffering guilt for his crimes.

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The murder of Alonya and Lizaveta forces the arrogant and intelligent protagonist , Raskolnikov, to face a terrible realization: either his ideal of the great man able to break from conventional morality in pursuit of his goals are bankrupt, or that he simply fails to measure up. Both realizations are actually true. Historically, his notion of a kind of Nietzschean superman has proven to be the justification offered for the horrors committed by many fascists and totalitarians, like Adolph Hitler. Within the novel, Raskolnikov discovers that his act doesn't really benefit anyone. He takes a paltry amount of plunder from the pawnbroker and fails to improve his situation. He also discovers that Lizaveta was actually a friend of Sonya's and was good to her, so he caused pain to someone he comes to care about. Moreover, after the murders, no one's problems are solved. Sonya is still a prostitute, Dunya...

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is still engaged to a monster, and Raskolnikov himself is not only not strengthened in his philosophical ambitions by his act but is more distracted than ever.

This is the double-torture that the protagonist endures. He feels the guilt that any sane and moral person would after taking an axe to two old women. These feelings, though, are not redemptive because they stand as direct evidence that for all his brilliance, he is not a superman. In a sense, the murders hold a mirror up to Raskolnikov and he is forced to admit how absurd his ideas are and how vain and foolish he has become. His financial ruin is transformed before his eyes from unjust punishment from an ungrateful world to the logical consequence of his refusal to work out of a sense of entitlement to recognition that he hasn't earned. He sees that he's not the next great philosopher but a law school dropout who has become a sponge on his family's limited resources, forcing his sister to offer herself to powerful men for their financial support (which she can use to help her brother). Raskolnikov, in this sense, is no better than Marmeladov, whose own self-indulgent failure has forced his daughter to become a prostitute. In a sense, Marmeladov can be seen as the better man because he at least has the decency to admit what he has done.

In essence, Raskolnikov's murder plot is a last ditch effort to preserve his own inflated idea of himself. By acquiring wealth through the murder of someone he regards as villainous and parasitic on the vulnerable, he hopes to vindicate his ideas while acting as some kind of moral hero freed from the indignity of menial labor. His despair at the failure of his plan on every level is the agony of the narcissist forced to confront himself as he really is, like Dorian Gray looking upon his own hideous portrait.

Like any true narcissist, however, Raskolnikov is not so quick to affect a true atonement or take a moral inventory of himself. The death of Marmeladov presents him with a chance to once more imagine himself as the hero. Marmeladov's death, covering Raskolnikov with blood, becomes in the protagonist's mind something like the death of Christ in its redemptive power. By giving 25 rubles of his mother's money to Marmeladov's widow, he feels himself to be standing between the vulnerable and destitution. That's why he feels pardoned: he has temporarily escaped from the reckoning forced on him by the murders. That feeling lasts right up until he finds his mother and sister in his room and he remembers how much he has failed them.

Of course, Raskolnikov's torment and self-loathing is unsustainable. Porfiry and Sonya are both right in that Raskolnikov really does need to confess and to serve his time of hard labor if he is ever going to make something of himself. Sonya's pledge to wait for him ends the novel with a tone of hope. Perhaps, if he's willing to do genuinely atone and abandon his sense of entitlement, he can become a man of genuine value to those around him.

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