Summer reading Assigment: Crime and Punishment Journal #2-- Claryliz

Two hundred more pages to read, and I slightly disagree with many of my classmates' opinions. It is relevant that the main character, Raskolnikov, has mental illness, and therefore needs psychological help. However, I believe that is his character and many of Dostoevsky's literary techniques that makes this novel such a compelling story. Being a story that was written so long ago, this is a story that can still occur today, and that can even attract readers in the twenty-first century, like myself. Not thoroughly read and a reader might feel that this story is just a verbose account of all the ridiculous ideas and actions of Raskolkinov. Yet I believe that this is a great story.
Raskolnikov seems to have two personalities, and one unifying idea. When one first reads about his crime, one thinks that it was just an impulse that he did without mayor thought. However, one then analyzes that his life has not been the best in the last couple of months; he had to quit college since he could not afford it, he was not living with his family (which he at the time loved), he barely had any friends (and of course not a girlfriend as well), he had a couple of months alone in his room, with NO ONE to talk to, and many things to imagine by himself. When asked about the article that he wrote on crime, I seemed to understand even more why he thought that his actions had to be done. He explained that there seemed to be two kinds of people: the "extraordinary" and the "ordinary." The first have the right to go over or defeat certain "obstacles" to get to their goal, and the latter "first preserves the world and increases it numerically," (pg261). In other words, the extraordinary goes beyond what is seen with the naked eye to go beyond and produce something for the future, while the ordinary like the word implies, is the regular man who lives for the moment. While hearing a young man complain in the tavern about the old lady, he felt even more right to kill her, since he would be eliminating one to help many others.
I definitely disagree with this theory of mind; however, with it I came to understand his character a bit more. He is still a perplexing character with many different personalities that is probably conflicted with a mental illness.