Dreams are a profound mystery that largely went unexplained throughout the majority of human history until Sigmund Freud tried tangling with them. One of his assertions was that if a person feels guilt for any reason but then represses that guilt so that he no longer senses it on a conscious level, it will emerge on an unconscious level, such as through insanity or nightmares. It is possible to repress guilt, of course, so that it no longer has much to do with us on a day-to-day level, but it does not leave. It simply lurks in a different part of the mind, showing up now and then in various ways. In Crime and Punishment, the guilt that Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov feels for murdering the pawnbroker and her daughter frequently shows up in dreams that represent Raskolnikov acting out the most devilish of deeds or that represent the deepest and darkest fears that Raskolnikov has in this world. The devil even appears, taking on the form of Raskolnikov’s victim, and the significance of that manifestation is that he still has guilt corroding his soul, and his responsibility is inescapable. The guilt (as well as the quite persistent Porfiry Petrovich) will ensure that Raskolnikov cannot escape the consequences of his crime.
It is helpful to reexamine the motives that Raskolnikov had in his heart when he committed the murder in the first place. The old woman had control over Raskolnikov, because she could decide whether or not to lend him money. He feels that his own life has become one of indecision and inactivity, and this act is one way in which he will reassert himself as an autonomous individual who has control over his own life. He feels that this act is necessary in order to eradicate this malaise from his soul. He works himself up into such a state that there is no compromise to be found between inaction and homicide. He tells himself that he must act with the power of a deity if he wants to drive his shameful weakness from his body and soul.
The problem with this decision is that Raskolnikov also makes the assumption that leaving his humanity behind means that he will also be able to walk away from the guilt. He has this idea that there are some people walking the planet who are allowed to break the law and wreak havoc in order to bring about a better future. He tells himself that the “extraordinary man has the rightin himself, to permit his conscience to overstepcertain obstacles” (Dostoevsk, web). Of course, this requires him to stop viewing the old woman as a fellow human being orbiting the sun with him and instead to view her as an object, because through the use of the word “obstacle” he equates her with such things as a sawhorse in a sidewalk or perhaps a tree that has fallen across the road. This is why he starts to use the word “louse” to refer to the old woman, because it is a lot easier to justify stomping on a tiny creature than it is to explain away ending the life of a fellow human. These stratagems are his way of trying to convince himself that he is also an extraordinary person. Pushing himself to murder through this rhetorical origami, he believes that murdering the old woman will make him just as much an extraordinary being as Napoleon had been, a fellow superman who is worthy of following no rules but his own.
Then, of course, Raskolnikov goes home and has an awful dream. He is going back through the murder, swinging the axe again and again, but this time the woman does not fall; instead, when he walks around to look at her face, she looks down and refuses to face him. Eventually, he notices that she is “laughing, overcome with noiseless laughter, striving with all her powers to prevent his hearing it” (Dostoevsky, web). Then the door to the bedroom opens, and the sounds of laughter and whispering flow through the door, assaulting his ears. He starts hitting her over and over again, but she will not stop laughing. People pour in to notice him, and when he tries to run, “his legs [are] rooted and [will] not stir” (Dostoevsky, web). There are several conclusions to draw from this dream. First, his attempt to elevate himself to the level of a superman has failed, and failed miserably. Why? Because his guilt has lodged on multiple levels of his mind, and when it emerges in his dreams, it points its finger at his failure. People try to crowd into that squalid apartment and see the silly man who is bludgeoning a woman to death – without having any effect on her. In fact, once the laughter starts and people crowd into the room, he cannot even leave. Finally, he stands over her figure, after she falls from the laughter, but he is still impotent. He thought that he would be able to bring himself a sense of freedom and power, but instead he simply is paranoid now, afraid even of his own shadow in the dream.
This stands in contrast, of course, with the euphoria that Raskolnikov had felt for a short time after committing the crime. However, the flood of guilt that follows is not something that he can overcome or escape. He thinks that committing the act will, in and of itself, make him indifferent to the emotional consequences that follow. However, the guilt that he feels becomes his own demon, ridiculing the thought that he could ever have been someone like Napoleon. Now it is left for his unconscious to show him, through his dreams, just how impotent and ridiculous he actually is.
The fact that the old woman appears in the dream reverses, in a way, the action that Dostoevsky took by swinging the axe on her in her apartment. Her return to life, even in his dream, suggests to him that he could not even complete the job of killing her correctly, which adds to the self-ridicule in the dream. However, it is important to note that, in real life, the woman has not returned from the dead. Instead, it is the unconscious of Raskolnikov’s own mind that has awakened her and animated her in his dreams. Raskolnikov’s mind is working against him, as the guilt that he feels is simply emerging on different levels of his cognitive process.
It is a symptom of Raskolnikov’s lack of satisfaction with himself that he continues to indulge the conversations with Porfiry Petrovich. After all, if he cannot elude the specter of guilt in his own mind, he might as well outsmart the policeman. So instead of simply refusing to meet with Porfiry Petrovich, or just leaving town with all that money, he meets with him, and his quavering exterior has to give as much away to the detective as the spluttering narrator must have in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” blathering away to the police who show up in the middle of the night, ridiculously perched right on top of the floorboards concealing his murder victim, thinking that he was persuading them of his innocence but instead simply ticking away the seconds until he blared forth his own guilt, perhaps even more loudly than the old man had screamed when his murderer had killed him.
The dream of the old woman who refuses to die is a powerful sign that Raskolnikov’s attempt to convert himself from a sniveling, weak mortal into the equivalent of Napoleon Bonaparte, simply by bludgeoning an old woman to death and running off with all of her money, has absolutely failed. One wonders, of course, if Napoleon himself dealt with guilt at all, particularly when his second exile had kicked in and he was all alone on that island, but the fact that Raskolnikov believes that Napoleon did not suffer from guilt drives him to try to reach that heady place himself. The woman appears in his dream, and this time she refuses to fall down, or stop laughing, let alone die like he wants her to. In the final analysis, he has only gone from being an inert man to an inert murderer.
Works Cited
Dostoevsky, Feodor. Crime and Punishment. n.d. Web. 5 May 2016.
