- Joined
- Oct 27, 2021
His kids do nothing in the summer? Don't see friends, go places, do camps, have fun? He can ignore them more when they're at home? Oh, yeah, guess so.Right now the cope is that he's busy with the kids and bringing them to various activities. So when summer hits and those activities settle down and he's still missing shows what will the new cope be?
Tell-tale hearts of raccoons under his deck, maybe. I'd work Dostoeyvsky into this somehow, but at least Raskolnikov was interesting.Funny enough, Edgar Allan Poe always has mentally ill alcoholics committing murders one way or another, I.E., The Black Cat. Maybe we're witnessing the Fall of the House of Rekieta?
On second thought (spoilers to a book I highly recommend):
Raskolnikov was a former (failed) law student who thinks of himself as exceptional, i.e., smarter than you and all the whos, which exceptionalism he believes renders him above the law. Believes he is an artist and unconstrained by family obligation, morally. Hypochondriacal. Becomes feverish, paranoid, erratic, skeletal, gleeful at what he has done. His supposed love* becomes shockingly thin and frail, and he believes her lot is to carry a heavy burden - so he taunts her. Mutters to himself in public. Faced with the reality of his ordinariness, he breaks down. He experiences guilt, but it us really shame...for his own mediocrity.
Lol, this excerpt from a random essay is on it:
* Sofia:
"She had a thin, very thin, pale face, rather irregular and angular, with a sharp little nose and chin. She could not have been called pretty....". He also finds her too religiously fanatic, in contrast to his own mockery. "The Gospels under my pillow, the very same book she read to me about Lazarus. She gave it to me, but I still haven’t opened it.". And:
"Illness, delirium … melancholy … all these psychological means of defence, these excuses and dodges, are quite untenable."
- Porfiry
Lol, this excerpt from a random essay is on it:
Dostoevsky shows Raskolnikov to be even more alienated from others while serving his time in Siberia. He is even more heartless to Sonia, who has followed him there. And he is even less remorseful about the murders than he was before his confession. Raskolnikov’s redemption is not about apology nor even about taking responsibility, for both these things serve as a kind of psychological balm that he craves as an antidote to anxiety. It feels good not to have to hide his secret. The emotional and psychological rapture Raskolnikov feels at the moment of public confession comes from no longer having to fear detection. It is a relief from his guilt. Confession is therapeutic, but it is not redemptive.
[...]Raskolnikov’s shame is deeper than his guilt, as shame always is. His shame has to do with not being seen rather than with avoiding detection. He feels guilt for what he did, but his shame is of a more subtle nature. Raskolnikov is intensely and personally ashamed of the self-knowledge he works so hard to avoid. It is the knowledge that the man he wanted to be—a desire so profound that he killed for it—was nothing more than an illusion in the first place, a wish-fulfillment fantasy played out in a grotesque experiment. He feels guilt that he came to resemble the grotesquery he created, but he is even more ashamed to admit that his sought individuation is itself the moral horror.
[...]
What he does not want to see or acknowledge is that his identity cannot be chosen or discovered from within, but that it comes mostly from without, by the ties that connect him to his family, to his occupation as a student, and to his friends. Raskolnikov’s moral struggle is ultimately not about crime and punishment, but about whether he will be redeemed of his solipsism.
* Sofia:
"She had a thin, very thin, pale face, rather irregular and angular, with a sharp little nose and chin. She could not have been called pretty....". He also finds her too religiously fanatic, in contrast to his own mockery. "The Gospels under my pillow, the very same book she read to me about Lazarus. She gave it to me, but I still haven’t opened it.". And:
She sat down. He looked kindly and almost compassionately at her.
“How thin you are! What a hand! Quite transparent, like a dead hand.”
He took her hand. Sonia smiled faintly.
“I have always been like that,” she said.
"Illness, delirium … melancholy … all these psychological means of defence, these excuses and dodges, are quite untenable."
- Porfiry
OK that was fun.