Fate in Crime and Punishment

In several passages of Crime and Punishment and especially during the confession scene with Sonia in Part V, Chapter 4, Raskolnikov attempts to clarify the motive which has impelled him to murder and rob the old pawnbroker, Alena Ivanovna. His difficulty in identifying the cause of his actions makes him one of the most fascinating and bewildering characters in world literature—a criminal in search of a motive, as Philip Rahv once observed. The first suggestions of a motive are made at the very beginning of the novel in the numerous references to the hero's penurious condition. The nineteenthcentury Russian critic Dmitrii Pisarev accepts these allusions at face value and asserts that Raskolnikov kills for money alone. Pisarev's explanation is undermined by the hero's failure even to count the money he has stolen. Nevertheless, the financial factor must not be rejected out of hand. Raskolnikov's impoverishment, is, if not the direct motive of his crime, the background against which his malevolent idea is conceived. A second motive, adumbrated in Part I and elaborated in Part V, is the so-called humanitarian motive. Alena Ivanovna is a scavenger living on the helplessness of her clients. The profits reaped from her usorious rates will go to a monastery after her death. Early in the novel Raskolnikov overhears a student tell a young officer that the murder of such a woman is an insignificant price to pay for the confiscation of her wealth and its distribution to the needy. Arithmetic justifies such a course: one life is lost (and a useless one at that) while thousands are saved. Raskolnikov is struck by the proposition because he himself has been thinking the very same thing. A third explanation of the crime—the "great man" theory—is found in the hero's article on crime and the psychology of the criminal. According to its central thesis certain men are ordained by history to accomplish momentous tasks, and, in order to reach their goals, they are empowered to bypass conventional morality and violate any rule that obstructs their way. Raskolnikov explains his Hegelian notion to Sonia in Part V, but discovers that he cannot accept it any more than she can understand it. The reader, however, must not dismiss this argument too quickly, for Dostoevsky himself attached considerable importance to it. In a long letter to his publisher he outlined the plot of Crime and Punishment and characterized his hero as a young man beguiled by certain "incomplete ideas" espoused by the members of his social milieu. This motive, like all the others, has a firm foundation in the data of the novel. For Raskolnikov truly believes, or wishes to believe, that he is such an extraordinary man, living beyond good and evil. A fourth explanation of the crime is akin to the "great man" theory. It views the hero's actions as an assertion of free will and the autonomy of the individual—themes which occupy a prominent place in several of Dostoevsky's earlier writings, especially in Notes from Underground. Raskolnikov says that he committed the murder for himself alone, that he wished to prove that he was not a louse but a man, i.e., a free man. In view of the author's preoccupation with the theme of volitional freedom it is not unreasonable to give this motive its due consideration. A fifth motive is also worthy of comment. Raskolnikov commits murder, it is claimed, because he is seeking suffering for himself. His numerous verbal and biographical ties to such spiritual masochists as Marmeladov, Katerina Ivanovna, and especially Mikolka, the young peasant who confesses to the hero's crimes, make this explanation quite plausible. According to a sixth