When I left off reading, Raskolnikov had committed the crime, been laid low by a fever, and has slowly recovered. He had been summoned to the police, a terror and a defeat, only to find they summoned him for debts, not murder.

Now, the fever is slowly leaving him, but he is still having nightmares. He hid the jewellery and told himself that he must have been ill when he committed the murder, or he would have done a better job of the crime and the aftermath (stains, hiding the loot, etc.). By his account, his incompetence is evidence that he couldn’t have been in his right mind, and thus, he must be relatively blameless for what he has done.

But good fortune has prevailed upon him in his illness. Natasha has been tending to him with soup and food, and his friend (Razumikhin) has arrived to help him recover financially, paying for a new suit and a doctor to attend to him. But when Luzhin, the sister’s fiancé, arrives, Rask goes a bit off on him and accuses him of his fears when reading his mother’s letter. Yet what set him off the most was his friend Raz debating whether a person already charged with the murder was really guilty or if his alibi was so weak that it must have been true.

The guilty mind is upon him for much of the 10%, including running into the police clerk and accusing him of thinking him the murderer when the police clerk was thinking no such thing. But as Rask escapes his bedroom and wanders the city, he is overcome repeatedly with dark thoughts, including that of suicide. Or to turn himself in. He even returns to the scene of the crime and pretends he wants to rent the apartment, but they throw him out for being strange.

It’s fascinating to see how the guilty mind is plaguing him.