Aaron Sandoval

During the Interactive Oral today we discussed the different factors that make a

criminal a criminal in Crime and Punishment. The presenters focused their presentation

on Sigmund Freud’s study of the criminal psychology, the pleasure principle, and

Yochelson’s and Samenow’s five point theory of free will to explain criminal behavior.

In our following discussion, we explored the two contrasting sides of Raskolnikov’s

personality, calculating versus emotional, and how they motivated him to complete his

crime.

One of the aspects that I found most fascinating about today’s oral was that many

of the five points that explain criminal behavior applied perfectly to Raskolnikov. For

instance, the presenters associated Raskolnikov’s peculiar, antisocial, and oftentimes

maniacal behavior throughout the story with the fact that criminals supposedly think and

act differently than other people. One opinion that I found insightful during the

discussion was that Raskolnikov committed the murder in order to test himself to see if

he was capable of murdering another human and not feeling any guilt. He strived to

emulate Napoleon Bonaparte, the famous French political leader who murdered many but

was respected in history for the impact he had. I believed that Dostoyevsky made the

audience sympathetic to Raskolnikov by portraying him as having the normal

deficiencies present to some degree in all of us. For example, Raskolnikov’s confirmation

bias, a basic human shortcoming, intensifies his criminal side. Although the letter he

received from his mother, the conversation he overheard in the bar, and the axe that he

finds to perform the murder may all be coincidences, he imbues them with significance

which serves to strengthen his convictions to commit the crime. I voiced my belief that he

sees these events as fate which prompts him to go through with his act.

Aaron Sandoval

While reading this novel, I had previously believed that it was only Raskolnikov’s

calculating side that motivated him to commit the crime and I had not thought about how

his cutting down of Lizaveta had been largely fueled more by his emotional side. He had

not planned for Lizaveta to be there on that fateful day; thus, he acted out of passion and

fear, killing her on a whim. This Interactive Oral was helpful for me because it allowed

me to consider the psychological explanations for Raskolnikov’s criminal behavior as

well as how both aspects of Raskolnikov’s split personality affected the decisions he

made throughout Crime and Punishment.

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