Day Ninety-Seven

7/7

The Book: Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

ISBN: 978-1-59308-081-5

Suggested By: Patrick Garcia

Where: Home (Longview, Tx)

When: 9-9:30P

Music: None

Company: Sissy

Pages: 258-313(55)

The Lead In: Dostoevsky takes some shots at God, but he does it through the lips of the murderer. I wonder if this is done to blunt the attack, or to use a despicable character to espouse something he disagreed with?

The 411 on the 55: Raskolnikov is becoming more and more ragged. He alternates between calm and insanity and switches quickly. He visits his sister’s fiancee with the rest of his family and a close friend and eventually it is revealed that the lawyer is a jerk and a control freak. They throw him out and the marriage is off. Money has been willed to his sister so things are not as pressing as it was originally thought.

A stranger meets R in the street, accuses him of murder, and walks away. Later, R visits the daughter (a prostitute) of the man who got ran over before. He mocks Sonya’s faith, but she is still nice to him. Eventually, he forces her to read the story of Lazarus to him.

Line of the Day: “I shall be a religious maniac myself soon! It’s infectious!” pg 311

Fact on the Fiction: Lazarus has made many appearances in popular works. On the list, Moby-Dick, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, and A Separate Peace. This passage is particularly important to Crime and Punishment in that it provides hope for both of Raskolnikov and Sonya. Both have experienced a sort of spiritual death, Sonya because of her extreme poverty and the time she spent as a prostitute in an attempt to support her family, and Raskolnikov because of his alienation from society. They feel that, like Lazarus, they may someday experience a sort of resurrection that would allow them to end their spiritual depravity.