Upon opening Fyodor Dostoevsky’s best-known work Crime and Punishment, readers are plunged almost immediately into a psychological evaluation of the process which goes into committing a crime and its impact on the human psyche. In the protagonist Raskolnikov’s mind, the line between appearances and reality quickly blurs together until it becomes nearly impossible to distinguish which is which -- at least, this is the case for Raskolnikov. Through Raskolnikov’s struggle to control his reality and his emotions, Dostoevsky paints a colorful picture describing what delirium is actually like. According to Dostoevsky, delirium is a state of mind in which a person loses his or her sense of coherence and ability to think clearly; he also creates a …show more content…
Though this is quite a bit easier for Raskolnikov to do in the first two parts of the novel, he is still capable of it in the later chapters of the novel. However, there are definite warning signs the delirium signs sends out to the rest of the world before Raskolnikov’s ultimate confession. Whether or not Raskolnikov is totally aware of these signs is a different matter altogether; the point that Dostoevsky makes with those shows of delirium (such as rambling, raving, paranoia, and sudden strange obsessions) is that the unofficial punishment for Raskolnikov’s crime is the slow erosion of his psyche from in-tact sanity to a shattered mess. Moreover, Raskolnikov’s seeming inability to see the worst of this falling-apart further points out how when humans experience traumatic experiences, they have to cope by blacking them out; however, this “blackout” manifests in many different ways. In Raskolnikov’s case, his fragile mental state paints a picture warning people of the fact that punishment and problems that develop from one’s wrong-doing aren’t always obvious and don’t always come from other