Crime and Punishment: the Motives of Raskolnikov

For the most part, human beings prefer simplicity in their daily life. There are however a small group of men and women who take it upon themselves to directly confront and understand the complicated. Fyodor Dostoevsky chose to accept such a challenge when he began his work on Crime and Punishment, choosing to focus all his efforts on understanding one of the most complicated subjects on the planet: the inner workings of the human mind. The protagonist (a deeply troubled student by the name of Raskolnikov) commits a murder early in the story. Rather than reducing and simplifying the reasons for the murder into one single reason or motive (as many novels now do), Dostoevsky forces his readers to explore all the motives and reasons that caused the young Russian intellectual to murder two innocent individuals. Ranging from the conscious to the subconscious, the intellectual to the moral, Dostoevsky leaves no area of Raskolnikov's thought process untouched. While at first there seems to be no completely accurate way in which to define Raskolnikov's motives, the reader can, through multiple readings of the text, formulate a clear and logical explanation as to what brought the Russian student to commit such an unwarranted crime. The initial reasoning that validated the crime for Raskolnikov was the idea that he could derive great economic gain for himself and for others from the murder. However, as the story continues, the first reason is proven to not actually be the only real cause for the crime. Raskolnikov later realizes that he also used the murder to answer the question of whether he had the right to morally circumvent the law.

Raskolnikov's life even before the murder was in shambles. “It would have been difficult to sink to a lower state of disorder.” (Dostoevsky P. 28). His arrogant tone and anti-social manner kept him mostly friend-free and his studying at the University had ground to a halt. Even Razumihin, his one true friend describes him as “simply cold...