February 17, 2012

On any given Saturday or Sunday morning, students across campus are waking up with the “Oh, shit” feeling. Memories of last night are floating back. Heads are being smacked against palms, against walls, against desktops — people do stupid things.

But there’s hope! No matter the crimes you may have committed, Raskolnikov (also referred by his more intimate, and shorter, name “Rodya”) has you beat. The other night, the troubled main character of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” got really messed up and killed a chick. Or two.

OK, so they weren’t exactly “chicks,” but more the haggard, miserly pawnbroker type and her idiot sister. Still, Rodya’s guilty conscience threatens his family, his sanity and his life all the same.

The madness begins with Rodya’s contemplation of the murder. A penniless student (hmm, sounds familiar), he decides the solution to all his financial problems resides in killing Alyona Ivanovna, a notoriously stingy and foul-tempered pawnbroker.

Naturally, he retrieves an axe and does the deed under the cover of darkness, accidentally catching the sister in the crossfire when she comes to investigate the hacking noises. He makes it out of the apartment unseen, but only just.

And that’s that — Rodya has done the deed and gotten away with it… or so it would seem. The real trouble is his guilt.

A heavy conscience causes Rodya to commit a series of idiotic blunders: returning to the scene of the crime, forgetting to return the murder weapon, showing far too much interest in the police investigation and (most revealingly) fainting whenever anything to do with the murders happens to be mentioned in his presence. What a noob.

Rodya overhears a conversation at the police station… and faints. He comes home to find his mother and sister discussing the murders… and faints. Apparently Rodya’s secret overwhelms him and manifests itself through swooning spells.

It also manifests itself through Rodya’s growing madness. He turns irritable for no reason, goes from peaceable one moment to glowering the next, and becomes suddenly distracted with alarming frequency.

Finally Rodya’s best friend Razumikhin (gotta love those Russian names) looks directly into his eyes and knows, without an exchange of words, that Rodya is guilty of the murders. Rodya’s bottled conscience weighs so heavily on him that it eventually works its way up to his haunted eyes.

Yes, other events transpire over the course of the book (the murders are committed in the first 100 pages), but “Crime and Punishment” focuses on Rodya’s internal downward spiral – if you’re looking for a bloody slasher book this isn’t it. Much of the book is made up of Rodya’s near-confessions and of his friends and family trying to drag a confession out of him.

So if you wake up with the “Oh, shit” feeling, _tell_ someone about it. Confess to a diary, a blog, a friend or (depending on the severity of the “Oh, shit”) the police. Rodya’s ordeal proves it’s better than losing your mind.

Confess or “it” will slip out of its own volition next weekend, whatever “it” might be.

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