Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov

His mother's letter binds his private misery to the fortunes of Dounia and Pulcheria Alexandrovna. He sees Dounia's engagement to Luzhin as another sacrifice made for him.

He murders Alyona Ivanovna with an axe and then kills Lizaveta when she unexpectedly enters the flat. The act he imagined as a test becomes a double crime and a disorder he cannot master.

Felled by brain fever, he lies for days in delirium in his garret, tended grudgingly by Nastasya and watched over by Razumihin, his mind circling the thing he has done.

Restless and reckless, he goads Zametov across a tavern table, all but naming himself the murderer to watch the clerk's face change.

He comes upon a man crushed under a carriage in the street, pays for his care, and presses his last roubles on the dead man's family.

Porfiry Petrovitch draws out the published article in which Raskolnikov divided people into ordinary and extraordinary, pressing him on whether some men may step over blood for a higher purpose.

He goes to Sonia and makes her read him the raising of Lazarus, drawn to the one soul whose suffering seems to answer his own.

He confesses the murders to Sonia, not as repentance but as a desperate need to be known. She answers with the demand that he suffer, confess publicly, and take up the cross.

After bowing in the Hay Market, he goes to the police office and confesses to Ilya Petrovitch that he killed the old pawnbroker and her sister.

In Siberia he remains proud and spiritually frozen until illness and Sonia's faithful presence break something open. The epilogue leaves him at the beginning of renewal, not at its completion.