400
PHILIP RAHV
he still cannot stop wavering and giving various and contradic–
tory explanations of his act. He begins by stating that he
murdered "for plunder," but when Sonia cries: "You were
hungry! It was to help your mother? Yes?" he at once retracts
that explanation, muttering: "No, Sonia, no .... I was not
so hungry . . . . I certainly did want to help my mother, but
that's not the real thing either . . . ." A little later he adds
that
if
he had simply killed the old pawnbroker because of
hunger he would
be
happy
now, exclaiming that he really
wanted to become a Napoleon and that is why he killed her.
Yet still later we hear him say that the argument from Napoleon
is "all nonsense" as he reverts to the explanation from poverty
and simple need. Soon enough, however, he strikes again the
Napoleonic note, accounting for the murder now as a matter
of wanting to have the daring: "I only wanted to have the
daring ... that was the whole cause of it"; he claims that he
killed "not to gain wealth and power" but for himself alone so
as to find out quickly whether "he was a louse like everybody
else or a man," whether he was a "trembling creature" or one
who has "the right" to step over barriers. Still another cause,
more immediately psychological in bearing, is introduced when
he speaks of his airless cupboard of a room, that room where
he turned sulky and sat "like a spider," where he would not
work but simply lay for hours thinking. It is chiefly this per–
petual thinking, this desperate resort to sheer reflection, which
is the source of the mystifications that torment him. Though
it is his consciousness which did
him
in, it is to his empirical self
that he absurdly looks for the justification it cannot supply;
so that in the end, for all the keenness with which he explicates
his
act to Sonia, we are still left with a crime of indeterminate
origin and meaning.
The indeterminacy is the point. Dostoevsky is the first
novelist to have fully accepted and dramatized the principle of
uncertainty or indeterminacy in the presentation of character.
In terms of novelistic technique this principle manifests itself
