How does guilt show itself, even when we are trying to hide it? - By Aiden Liu
How does guilt show itself, even when we are trying to hide it?
Dostoevsky's masterpiece explores the inescapable manifestations of guilt through psychological torment.
"He sank into a state resembling delirium. If he had been asked, he could not have said how long he was in that state. He almost forgot everything that had happened in those days. At times it seemed as though years, or at least many days, had passed and at times it seemed as if it were the same day."
(Part 2, Chapter 2)
Raskolnikov’s voice seeps through the narrator; every sentence feels steeped in his fever, as if the page itself has absorbed his heat. Dostoevsky laces the prose with a quiet delirium, where the air around each thought feels thickened, unstable. His presence shows through the narrator’s voice through parallels between Raskolnikov’s inner state and the prose; His reasoning wavers like scaffolding over rot, still standing but no longer sound. What we witness is a soul fraying from within, collapsing thought by thought as if pulled inward by something it cannot name.
On the surface, he lies still—just a man in a room, just another fever. But beneath that stillness, the self is fracturing. Not shattering all at once, but splintering inward, like glass under pressure; hairline cracks spreading from a center he no longer controls. The beliefs he built himself around his theories and justifications can no longer hold his weight. Guilt, which he’s tried to rationalize and suppress, has begun to speak in the language of illness. It hums beneath the skin, rearranging his sense of time, pulling the world out of focus. The room thickens. Thought loses shape. His attempt to sever logic from morality is crumbling, and in its place, the body steps in to do what the mind won’t: expose the cost of silence. The sweating, the forgetting, the sense that time is folding in on itself—these aren’t symptoms of sickness alone, but signals. The conscience has slipped past reason, and now it moves through flesh.
It’s happening in a room too small to breathe in. A place the narrator tells us “resembled a cupboard more than a place in which to live”. Raskolnikov’s setting is a reflection of his inner collapse. ”There was an extraordinary sense of some strange, hideous and perhaps ludicrous incongruity in his thoughts. He stared at the filthy yellow wall with its dust-covered blue wallpaper... he felt that he was suffocating.” His world is dark, close, airless. Even when he moves outside, the city itself feels oppressive. It’s as if his self-hate guilt has narrowed every corridor, made the sky hang lower. His torment may begin in his mind, but Dostoevsky shows how it spills into every inch of space he occupies，
After the murder, but before the confession, Raskolnikov enters a space that no longer belongs to time. The act is complete, yet nothing feels finished. He moves through days that barely distinguish themselves, suspended in a kind of half-life where the crime lingers without consequence. This is the purgatory of guilt, a liminal pause where silence pretends to offer safety and the mind still clings to the illusion that it can reason its way out. But the body begins to tell a different story. His skin breaks into fever. His thoughts loosen; His sleep fractures; He hasn’t spoken the truth aloud, yet something inside him has already begun to unravel. Dostoevsky doesn’t wait for a confession. The guilt has already entered the room, making itself visible in disorientation, in dread, in the quiet disorder of time losing its shape. This is not a resolution. This is imprisonment without walls.
Internal conflict:At the core of Crime and Punishment is a battle not between characters, but within one—a mind caught between its ideals and its instincts. Raskolnikov tells himself he has killed a principle, not a person. He tries to wrap the act in theory, to bury it in reason, but the body resists abstraction. His hands tremble. His sleep collapses into fever. His memory slips. The logic that once seemed unshakeable begins to thin like ice under pressure. One part of him wants to be the "extraordinary man" who transcends law; the other still flinches at blood. This is not just a moral conflict. It is the slow collapse of a self that no longer believes in its own blueprint. Dostoevsky gives us no distance from this descent. He invites us to feel the interior tearing. Guilt doesn’t arrive like thunder. It leaks in—through fever, through dreams, through silence that refuses to stay quiet. The crime is complete, but the punishment unfolds in the mind’s quiet unraveling, when the story he told himself begins to slip from his grasp.
"He sank into a state resembling delirium. If he had been asked, he could not have said how long he was in that state"
This line opens a window into psychological decay. Delirium does not emerge from sickness but from the pressure of unspoken memory. Raskolnikov’s mind begins to splinter under the weight it refuses to name. Guilt presses inward, warping his sense of space, dissolving his sense of time. Hours lose their edges. Reality stretches thin. The structure of his consciousness, once sharp and disciplined, grows soft at the seams. His thoughts do not vanish—they tangle, collapse inward, unable to hold. What remains is a mind displaced, not by disease, but by meaning too heavy to carry. Dostoevsky shows how guilt, when denied language, finds another route. It rewires perception. It records the self; It lives in the fog behind the eyes, where speech fails and memory takes root as symptom.
"He almost forgot everything that had happened in those days"
This line reveals the quiet mechanics of repression. The mind, overwhelmed by what it cannot contain, begins to reorganize itself in silence. Rooms go dark. Corridors close. Memory is not lost, but tucked away—some moments exiled to the farthest corners, others draped in fog too dense to enter. Guilt here becomes not just emotional—it becomes architectural. It reshapes the internal space, not through explosion, but through rearrangement. What Raskolnikov cannot confront, his mind shelters behind closed doors. The violence is not in the memory itself, but in how carefully it is buried—made invisible, yet still present, like a locked room behind the walls of thought.
"At times it seemed as though years, or at least many days, had passed and at times it seemed as if it were the same day"
Guilt does not move with the hands of a clock. It folds time in on itself, stretches seconds until they feel like years, then swallows whole days without a trace. Raskolnikov drifts through this distortion, unable to tell whether he is living through the aftermath or echo. The murder doesn’t sit quietly in the past—it spreads, seeps into every hour, making the present indistinguishable from the moment of the crime. Dostoevsky renders time not as a measure, but as a symptom. The boundaries between now and then dissolve, and with them, Raskolnikov’s sense of self. This is not just disorientation—it is containment. A mind trapped inside its own loop, circling the same wound, never allowed to step out of it. In this collapse of sequence and structure, we witness what guilt erodes first: the rhythm of being alive.
"He glanced at his rags with disgust, and hatred flared up in his heart - hatred above all of himself"
When Raskolnikov looks at his rags, he isn’t judging the fabric. He is encountering a reflection. The threadbare clothes carry more than poverty—they carry the imprint of his unraveling. His gaze doesn’t pause on texture or wear; it sinks inward, turning disgust into self-recognition. The hatred he feels is not abstract. It is physical. Personal. It’s a recoil from the self that committed the crime and now walks around wearing its remnants. Guilt here doesn’t wait for words or confession. It has already rooted itself in the body, shaping thought, tightening the chest, warping perception. The moment becomes a mirror. Not the kind that shows what one is—but the kind that refuses to lie. The body confesses what the voice still withholds. And in that silent admission, Dostoevsky draws the connection: guilt has moved from idea to instinct, from conscience to skin. What remains is not clarity—but rot, blooming beneath recognition.
"Good God! Can it be, can it be, that I shall really take an axe, that I shall strike her on the head, split her skull open..."
The line unspools like panic caught mid-thought—words circling themselves, frantic, unable to land. “Can it be, can it be”—the echo is a tremor, a sound that shakes before the blade ever lifts. The grotesque imagery—“split her skull open,” “sticky warm blood”—is too vivid, too bodily to be theoretical. These aren’t thoughts. They are rehearsals. The mind plays out the violence not as strategy, but as confession it cannot yet speak aloud. Guilt enters before the act, not after, settling into each imagined detail like blood soaking into cloth. This is not hesitation. It is foresight. Raskolnikov walks forward already shadowed by the aftermath. The crime begins in the mind long before it reaches the room. And in that mental staging, Dostoevsky reveals how conscience doesn’t wait for consequence. It arrives early, flickering behind every imagined strike, every drawn breath, every silent moment he cannot seem to silence.
When we pretend long enough, the performance stops feeling like a performance. The mask settles into the skin. In Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky traces what happens when guilt is not expressed, but rehearsed—when a person lives so deep inside denial that the body is forced to carry what the voice will not. Guilt does not vanish in silence; it reshapes itself. It settles into the bones, distorting time, fraying memory, turning fever into a language. Raskolnikov tries to stay hidden behind theory and pride, but his body begins to speak louder than his mind. Delirium, forgetfulness, shame—they leak out through every pore, each one a symptom of something he thought he had silenced. Guilt takes form not in confession, but in reaction. The clothes he wears, the hours he loses, the dreams that twist in sleep—all of it becomes a script the mind keeps performing, even after forgetting the lines.
Write anonymously. This is a sacred space of reflection.