During your reading of Crime and Punishment, you will occasionally make entries in what we will call your Significant Quote Log.
In Crime and Punishment, as in many great works of literature, all text is not equal. Some passages are more important than others because they reveal a key theme, pattern, foreshadowing, character description, plot development, or clue to a world view. Good readers develop the ability to notice these significant quotes while they are reading.
In your Significant Quote Log, you will practice this skill. Each time you read a section of the novel, pick a quote that you sense is significant (even if you are not sure why), and then write a paragraph in which you attempt to explain why you picked it, what makes it important.
Your paragraph does not have to be definitive in tone; you can makes suggestions and explore possibilities. But you do need to be thoughtful and probing.
Sometimes you will do the write-up for homework; other times you need only pick the quote at home and then will have time to write the explanatory paragraph in class. Either way, the write-up will follow this format:
Raskolnikov handed back the pen, but instead of getting up and leaving, he put both elbows on the desk and clutched his head with his hands. He felt as though a nail were being driven through its crown. A strange idea suddenly came to him: that of standing up right now, going over to Nikodim Fomich and telling him everything that had happened the day before, down to the last detail, and then taking him to his lodgings and showing him the gold objects in the corner, inside the hole. The urge was so strong that he actually stood up in order to put it into action. ‘Shouldn’t I think about it for a moment?’ flashed through his head. ‘No, it’s better to do it without thinking, and get if off my chest!’ But suddenly he stood still like one thunderstruck: Nikodim Fomich was talking heatedly to Ilya Petrovich, and he could hear what they were saying. (127)
Here is Raskolnikov being Raskolnikov again: the usual implusiveness, the over-thinking, the hyperactive imagination, and the easy distractibility. What’s new, however, is that Raskolnikov is now a murderer, so we get to see how his personality will deal with this new reality. This scene gives us our first hint: from now on, Raskolnikov will be tortured by an urge to confess his crime. Perhaps this is the start of his “punishment.” It is fitting, then, that he feels like a nail has been “driven through [his] crown.” “Crown” is the same word that Dostoyevsky used when describing the ax coming down on Lizaveta’s head back on page 98.
Posted by Justin Wells : 03/31/2009