Some thoughts on Crime & Punishment
First, spoiler warning for Crime & Punishment. Yes, I know the book was written in 1866, but still. If you haven’t read it, I urge you to stop reading these words and go, now, and read Dostoevsky’s. Those are excellent words.
I spent a lot of time, while reading Crime & Punishment, and afterwards, asking myself why I care about Raskolnikov. What does Dostoevsky do to achieve that? To be clear, I don’t absolve Raskolnikov of his wrong-doing. The man committed a double murder. While it’s true that one of his victims I feel little sympathy for, the other I most definitely do. As I read the book, I want him to be caught, and I want him to be punished. And yet, I never hate him. In fact, more than anything, I think I want him to be redeemed.
So, how does Dostoevsky achieve this? There are three things that leap out at me about his presentation of this difficult and flawed protagonist.
- Other characters care about him. More importantly, I think, is that decent people care about him. A member of my writing group commented one day that one way to make a character more likable is to have other characters in the story like them. I have since heard that advice more than once. I may even have heard it before, but I had never really considered it until he said it. In Crime & Punishment, Raskolnikov’s mother and sister adore him. Sonya falls in love with him. Razumíkhin remains a steadfast friend throughout. Even Nastasya, his landlady’s maid, seems fond of him.
Razumíkhin and Sonya, in particular, I find deeply sympathetic. For me, their opinion of Raskolnikov carries weight. Seeing him through their eyes forces me to constantly pause and reconsider my opinion. It sets up a dissonant state in which I find myself asking, “How could this man they are all so devoted to really have committed this awful crime?”, even while I know that he did.
- Raskolnikov is not a well man. He is both physically ill and deeply depressed throughout the course of the story. Not only can I empathize with his misery, but I think it makes his narration unreliable and untrustworthy. I would not call him an unreliable narrator in the sense that he is knowingly misleading the reader. I judge him to be unreliable in the sense that I do not think he is always within his right mind. Again, this is not to say that his physical or mental state excuses his actions, or to imply that depressed people are more likely to commit murder. Desperate people, however, I feel safe in saying, have been known to make terrible decisions, and Raskolnikov feels desperate.
- His guilt. He is so torn up by what he’s done that he never even profits from it. He doesn’t alleviate his own poverty, nor that of his mother and sister. I could see an argument being made that this makes the crime somehow worse; that his victims died for nothing. And I’m sympathetic to that argument, but I see his guilt as the clearest sign that he is a man who has committed evil, and not, at his core, an evil man.
I view this book as a master class in the handling of a protagonist who is very far from being a hero. Raskolnikov, to me, illustrates the idea of being one’s own worst enemy. He is more antagonist, in my mind, than the inspector who solves the crime; both the protagonist and antagonist rolled up in one.
If it’s not clear by now, I love Dostoevsky’s writing. I’m aware that many people before me have written wiser and more educated words about Dostoevsky, in general, and this book, in particular. But writing about my impressions of the book helps me to sharpen my thinking about it, examine the feelings it prompts in me, and learn from it.
Perhaps, another day, I’ll write about his seamless point of view switching — a feat I’ve tried to mimic in at least one story so far. I mean, why not aim high?