396
PHILIP RAHV
ing to his immediate situation. From beginning to end he is
in a state of crisis from which there is no diversion or escape
either in memory or fantasy. The import of what he thinks,
feels, and remembers is strictly functional to the present. Thus
he thinks of his mother, who is involved in the action, with
distinct alternations of feelings, while his dead father hardly
exists for him. He belongs to the past, and so far as Raskolnikov
is concerned the past is empty of affect. The one time he
evokes his father's figure is in the anguished dream of the
beating to death of the little mare, and his appearance in that
dream is singularly passive, manifestly carrying with it no
charge of emotion. This dream, enacting a tragic catharsis, is
introduced with calculated ambiguity. Is the dreamer actually
remembering an episode of his childhood or is he imagining the
memory? In any case, though the dream is of the past its
meaning is all in the present. The pitiful little mare, whipped
across the eyes and butchered by Mikolka and a crowd of
rowdy peasants, stands for
all
such victims of life's insensate
cruelty, in particular such victims as Sonia and Lizaveta whose
appeal to Raskolnikov is that of "poor gentle things ... whose
eyes are soft and gentle." Also, the mare stands above all for
Raskolnikov himself, and in embracing her bleeding head in a
frenzy of compassion it is himself he is embracing, bewailing,
consoling. He is present in the dream not only as the little boy
witnessing an act of intolerable brutality but as at once its
perpetrator and victim too. The dream's imagery is entirely
prospective in that it points ahead, anticipating the murder
Raskolnikov is plotting even while exposing it as an act of
self-murder. Its latent thought-content is a warning that in
killing the pawnbroker he would be killing himself too, and it
is indeed in this light that he understands his deed afterwards
when, in confessing to Sonia, he cries out: "Did I murder the
old woman? I murdered myself, not her! I crushed myself
once and for all, forever." The cathartic effect of the dream
is
such that upon awakening he recovers the sense of his human
