CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
399
cluster of motives, a veritable
embarras de riches,
and
if
the
criminal himself is in his own fashion constrained to take part
in the work of detection it is because he is soon lost in the maze
of his own motivation. Never quite certain as to what it was
exactly that induced him to commit murder, he must continu–
ally spy on himself in a desperate effort to penetrate his own
psychology and attain the self-knowledge he needs if he is to
assume responsibility for his absurd and hideous act. And this
idea of him as the criminal in search of his own motive is
precisely what is so new and original in the figure of Raskol–
nikov.
His knowing and not knowing is in a sense the worst of his
ordeal. He is aware of several motives that keep eluding him as
his thought shifts among them, and there are times when they
all seem equally unreal to him. To sustain himself in the terrible
isolation of his guilt he must be in complete possession of a
single incontrovertible motive representing his deepest self, his
own rock-bottom truth. But he no sooner lays hold of this truth
than he catches himself in a state of mind that belies it, as,
for example, in the scene when right after burying the loot-a
purse and some trinkets of jewelry-he suddenly stops in the
street to confound himself with a simple and terrifying ques–
tion:
"If
it had all really been done deliberately and not
idiotically, if I really had a certain and definite object, how
is it that I did not even glance into the purse and didn't know
what I had there. Then why have I undergone these agonies
and have deliberately undertaken this base, dirty and degrading
business?" This is but one of several passages in which the
abstraction, so to speak, of the crime, its lack of empirical
substance, is brought home to us. There is an intrinsic incon–
gruity between this criminal and
his
crime which is exhibited by
the author with masterful indirection, and nowhere to better
effect than when Raskolnikov makes his confession to Sonia.
In the course of it, though straining as hard as he can to
discover and at long last seize the motive that impelled him,
