Suffering in Crime and Punishment
Number of pages:
3
ABSTRACT:
A 3 page essay that briefly discusses the theme of suffering in this novel. Suffering is an omnipresent theme in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, as, with only a few prominent exceptions, everyone in the novel is desperately poor. However, from the first page of the novel, Dostoyevsky makes it clear that primary cause of his protagonist's suffering is not his poverty. Raskolnikov, who is also referred to as "Rodya" or "Rodka," is a former student and living in poverty as the novel opens, but it is not poverty that makes his existence torturous; rather it is his nihilistic, superior attitude toward other people that is the principle cause of his suffering. Dostoyevsky makes this clear by contrasting Raskolnikov's suffering against that of characters who do have functional relationships, such as Sonya, the woman with whom Raskolnikov eventually realizes he loves. No additional sources cited.
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File: D0_khdossuf.rtf
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