Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky | A Reading

Finneran's Wake

“You see, I wanted to become a Napoleon…that’s why I killed. Well, is it clear now? Would Napoleon have gone ahead or not?” Doubtless, he would have. The Corsican artilleryman, that great general upon whom, in the rubble of the Revolution, the dazzling title of “First Consul” was bestowed, was little encumbered by his conscience, and seldom dissuaded by the scruples of his Christian faith. Indeed, he was subject to no higher moral law, no Decalogue issued at Sinai’s misty peak. He cast himself, instead, quite beyond the realm of good and evil--that same meek, pallid, wretched world from which our young Raskolnikov sought his escape. In his murder of a louse, and her innocent sister as well, perhaps he found it. We hesitate, though, to proclaim him a Napoleon reincarnate. Such an epithet is for others to apply.