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Katerina's Suffering

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Suffering is seen throughout the novel Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky many times. The reader sees that with suffering comes the responsibility to accept it. All of the characters in the novel have a different way to accept, or not accept the suffering. This is shown throughout the whole novel with Raskolnikov committing the crime and trying to get away with it. The reader also has Sonia, who tries to take everyone’s suffering. Lastly we have Katerina, who does not take any responsibility for her suffering, instead she looks at others to take her pain. Katerina’s inability to take responsibility for her own suffering is represented through her illness. Throughout the story, blood is shown as a cause of suffering. The first instance …show more content…

When Katerina is introduced we are told immediately that she is sick. At the memorial dinner, Katerina’s introduction of people are over exaggerated. When Raskolnikov arrives to the dinner the narration states, “Katerina Ivanovna was greatly delighted to see him, … he was the one ‘educated visitor,and, as everyone knew, was in two years to take a professorship in the university’”(300). Katerina is showing off Raskolnikov. By praising Raskolnikov to her guests, she is saying that she is above the rest. Katerina believes that by stating these things about her guests, she is automatically better, because of affiliation. Whenever Katerina is mentioned, she starts to have horrible cough attacks, which cause her to cough blood. Since blood is seen when there is suffering, the reader can conclude that Katerina …show more content…

In the dinner Katerina puts together, the narrator states, “Perhaps the chief element was that peculiar ‘poor man’s pride’, which compels many poor people to spend their last savings on some traditional social ceremony, simply in order to do ‘like other people’, and not to ‘be looked down upon.’ It is very probable, too, that Katerina Ivanovna longed on this occasion” (297). Katerina is poor but she does not accept this. She has little money, and the money that she has, she spends on social events. Katerina does not want to be seen as below anyone. Katerina “had been brought up ‘in genteel, she might almost say aristocratic colonel’s house’ and had not been meant for sweeping floors” (297). Katerina does not believe it is her fault that she is poor. She insists that because her father raised her noble, she cannot be poor or have the ability to

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