4 - Crime and Punishment: driving other people crazy

Summary

In spite of the length of Crime and Punishment this chapter will be a relatively short one. My aim is not to offer a reading of the novel as a whole but to explore a number of the strategies which it exemplifies. Dostoyevsky's first major novel provides the opportunity for extending the study of his psychology into new areas, specifically into the areas of personal interaction and coexistence on which Bakhtin writes so eloquently. As a result of the choice of a third person narrative technique which permitted the narrator to focus on more than one character at once and, more important, to give them something approaching equal weight in accordance with the principle of ‘polyphony’, this novel exemplifies and clarifies a number of issues which were depicted only one-sidedly in the earlier works I have discussed. It shows, for example, what may happen when people attempt mutually to objectify and classify each other, seek to impose two or more incompatible images on another person at the same time, and deploy emotionally disturbing strategies on each other. This is an area into which Bakhtin declines to venture.

In the person of the protagonist, Raskolnikov, the novel exemplifies an inner conflict between emotional demands for objectification (particularly of other people, but not exclusively) and (inter)subjectivity.