Noah Philipose’s Reviews > Crime and Punishment > Status Update

“The candle-end was flickering out in the battered candlestick, dimly lighting up in the poverty-stricken room the murderer and the harlot who had so strangely been reading together the eternal book.”

He felt it almost amusing, and yet it wrung his heart. Deep down, hidden far away out of sight all that seemed to him now—all his old past, his old thoughts, his old problems and theories, his old impressions and that picture and himself and all, all... He felt as though he were flying upwards, and everything were vanishing from his sight.

Rodion’s nightmare about the horse is genuinely one of the most disturbing and crushing things I’ve ever read. A mob of drunken men whip it and beat it to death while people stand and watch, as Rodion wails in anguish. Lots of interpretations can be made of this dream, none of them comforting. Is it a symbol of his own innocence being cruelly destroyed by external factors? Is it his sister? Harrowing chapter.

“… poverty is not a vice, that's a true saying. Yet I know too that drunkenness is not a virtue, and that that's even truer. But beggary, honoured sir, beggary is a vice. In poverty you may still retain your innate nobility of soul, but in beggary-never—no one. For beggary a man is not chased out of human society with a stick, he is swept out with a broom, so as to make it as humiliating as possible…”