The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [146]
An increasingly important part is now played in Raskolnikov's life and thoughts by Sonia Marmeladov, the meek young prostitute who, although she has become degraded to support her drunken father, consumptive mother and the rest of the family, is deeply religious. Indeed the inner structure of Raskolnikov's torment may now be charted through his alternating interviews with two figures, Sonia and a strangely authoritative, almost fatherly examining magistrate, Porfiry. In his first private conversation with Sonia, Raskolnikov for some reason asks her to read him the story of how Lazarus was brought back from the dead. He is then summoned by Porfiry for a routine interview, as one of the old moneylender's list of clients. The shrewd magistrate tells him that people who have committed such crimes will always eventually give themselves up, like moths coming to a candle. At his second meeting with Sonia, Raskolnikov confesses his crime. Pitying his terrible distress, she says she will never leave him. He then returns to Porfiry who says he knows that Raskolnikov has committed the crime and that he will eventually `decide to accept suffering' by coming clean about it.
As the nightmare of other people's disordered lives closes in on him from all sides - the drunken Marmeladov has been run over and killed in the street, his wife is evicted from her rooms, goes mad and also dies, the admirer of Raskolnikov's sister Dunya shoots himself - Raskolnikov can at last take no more. He goes into the police station, gives himself up and is sentenced to seven years hard labour in a Siberian prison camp.
Even now, as he begins his sentence, Raskolnikov still has not faced up inwardly to the full extent of his guilt. But he is accompanied to Siberia by the faithful Sonia, who lives outside the camp, and becomes an almost saintly figure, a 'little mother, to his fellow prisoners. Finally Raskolnikov has a nightmare of the whole world being swept by a terrible disease, which gives all who are infected by it the conviction that they alone are right. Everyone is set against everyone else, until all are destroyed. It is the horrific vision of a world in which everyone has become like himself. Raskolnikov is moved to the core of his being, and when he next meets Sonia throws himself down to kiss her feet. She knows at last that he is beginning to come to himself and loves her. Later he picks up her little New Testament, from which she had read him the story of Lazarus, the man returned from the dead, and one thought flashes through his mind, `is it possible that her convictions can be mine too, now?':
`But that is the beginning of a new story, the story of the gradual rebirth of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his gradual passing from one world to another, of his acquaintance with a new and hitherto unknown reality ...'
Silas Marner
In A Christmas Carol the central redeeming figure, Tiny Tim, was a child. In Crime and Punishment it is a young girl, Sonia. In a third nineteenth-century novel, George Eliot's Silas Marner, it is a combination of both.
The central figure Silas Marner is a weaver who, for 15 years, has lived all alone in a solitary cottage near the country village of Raveloe. He had grown up far away in a great manufacturing town, where as a young man he had been a member of an obscure religious sect, engaged to another, a girl called Sarah. But one day, almost as if he had passed under an evil spell, Marner had found himself falsely accused of stealing some money by a third member of the sect, who also had designs on Sarah. All Marner's protestations of innocence had been in vain, he had been framed and found guilty, and his treacherous accuser, the real thief, had completely won the day and the hand of Sarah. Marner had fled the scene, to end up in his lonely cottage.
Initially Marner and his new neighbours had got on reasonably well, but then they had begun to shun him, looking on the solitary weaver with fear and suspicion. He had turned in on himself,