This is a brutal novel centered around the brilliantly confused mind of a murderer. “His whole body was as if broken; his soul was dark and troubled. He leaned his elbows on his knees and rested his head in both hands. “God!” he exclaimed, “but can it be, can it be that I will really take an axe and hit her on the head and smash her skull … slip in the sticky, with blood … with the axe … Lord, can it be?” He was trembling as he said it. “But what’s wrong with me?”” Raskolnikov tries to justify his actions during brief moments of lucidity. “The old woman was a mistake perhaps, but she’s not the point! The old woman was merely a sickness … I was in a hurry to step over … it wasn’t a human being I killed, it was a principle!” He is obviously not in his right mind. "“You’ve all been saying that I was mad,” Raskolnikov went on, twisting his mouth into a smile, “and just now I imagined that perhaps I really am mad and was only seeing a ghost!… And who knows! Maybe I really am mad, and everything that’s happened during these days, maybe everything is just in my imagination.”” There is more than a little of Nietzsche’s notion of the superman and the will to power in the sick mind of Raskolnikov. ““Then I realized, Sonya,” he went on ecstatically, “that power is given only to the one who dares to reach down and take it. Here there is one thing, one thing only: one has only to dare! And then a thought took shape in me, for the first time in my life, one that nobody had ever thought before me! Nobody! It suddenly came to me as bright as the sun: how is it that no man before now has dared or dares yet, while passing by all this absurdity, quite simply to take the whole thing by the tail and whisk it off to the devil! I … I wanted to dare, and I killed … I just wanted to dare, Sonya, that’s the whole reason!””
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