Reading Response #2: Theme

As the title of the novel suggests, one of the main themes Dostoevsky explores in Crime and Punishment, is that of punishment. In order to fully analyze this theme, Dostoevsky draws on his own personal experiences. After being arrested for joining a group of liberal Utopians, Dostoevsky was sentenced to 8 years of hard labour in Siberia. In the novel, Raskolnikov is similarly sentenced to hard labour in Siberia for the murder of the old pawnbroker. Just as Dostoevsky was never the same after his experiences, Raskolnikov was also greatly changed by his time in Serbia. The hard labour he was forced to endure allowed him to come to terms with what he had done, and find redemption through it. Dostoevsky uses this scenario as a metaphor; it is his way of saying that redemption only comes to those who pay for what they have done, and understand the wrong in it.

Although Dostoevsky does use legal punishment to demonstrate this metaphor, it is not, in fact, the type of punishment he spends most of the novel considering. Instead, he looks at the punishment one brings upon himself after committing a detestable act. In other words, he describes Raskolnikov's conscience. At one point in the novel, I finally gained some insight into why Raskolnikov wanted to kill the old pawnbroker. He attempted to rationalize his actions by suggesting that:
"...all people are somehow divided into the 'ordinary' and the 'extraordinary'. The ordinary must live in obedience and have no right to transgress the law, because they are, after all, ordinary. While the extraordinary have the right to commit all sorts of crimes and in various ways to transgress the law, because in point of fact they are extraordinary." (Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment 259).

Raskolnikov tries to believe that he is the second type of person; the type with the right to commit an horrible act imaginable simply because he is 'extraordinary'. However, his conscience will not believe it. Subconsciously, Raskolnikov is sickened by his actions, and this sickness even takes the form of a physical illness. It strikes him shortly after the murder, and he is bedridden for weeks. However, Raskolnikov does not only suffer physically, he also endures an incredible amount of emotional turmoil as he tries, and fails, to rationalize his actions. Although he was able to explain his actions in a 'logical' and intellectual way, he forgot one thing. The human conscience cannot be put at ease by logic alone, it demands that the wrong the person had done be righted, or they will suffer for their actions, as Raskolnikov suffered for his. Although Raskolnikov is the protagonist of this story, I found that I was not at all sympathetic to his plight, and I even felt a certain amount of justification for his pain. I felt that Raskolnikov had committed a heinous crime, not just in terms of the law, but in terms of humanity, and I was, in a way, relieved to see that he was human enough to be punished for it by his conscience alone.