The Failure of the Extraordinary Man: Cognitive Dissonance and Moral Fragmentation of Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment

Abstract

There has been much critical writing about guilt, morality and psychological agony in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment. The psychological conflicts involved in Raskolnikov’s divided consciousness have been a subject of numerous psychoanalytical interpretations, but the connection between his self-fashioning of ideology and psychological conflict is open to further analysis. In this paper, utilization of both Leon Festinger’s Cognitive Dissonance Theory and Freudian psychoanalysis is integrated with an eye towards understanding the fragmentation of Raskolnikov’s mind. The study highlights the conflict between a rationalization of intellect and moral awareness as explored through the main character’s philosophy of the “Extraordinary Man” on his dreams, hallucinations and encounters with Sonia Marmeladova. The psychological anguish experienced by Raskolnikov is explained by the psychoanalytical framework of psychological tension between his theoretical beliefs and moral drive using the theory of cognitive dissonance, repression, unconscious, and superego. The study aims to show, by a careful literary examination that in Dostoevsky guilt is not only a moral or religious concept but something much more complex, a psychological condition that causes a process of self-denial and undermines both identity and certainty of ideology.