Comment on Mikaela's (October 28th)

 As the news of the murder starts to become the talk of the town, we start to see how everyone reacts to it. Mikaela pointed out that both Raskolnikov and the painter act guilty but everyone else assumes that Raskolnikov is just ill and does not know what he is saying while the painter is clearly conscious and is acting according to his guilty conscious. While Razumikhin and the doctor discuss the evidence and the painter, Raskolnikov starts to stress out and randomly interrupt the conversation. While reading the passage about Razumikhin's thoughts on the guiltiness of the painter, it was hard to understand his side of the matter. At one point, he accuses the painter, as Mikaela had said, but then the next sentence he is saying that the painter had no motive to do anything and there were witnesses that saw him fighting with the other man. The details of the crime scene add to the confusion of the reader. Even though this plot line could be solved in a couple of chapters, Dostoyevsky makes the plot complicated to show how hard it is to solve this problem when the real murderer is being treated for a physical illness. Mikaela's prediction that Raskolnikov will eventually crack from the pressure of keeping his guilt inside him is not far off. Keeping a secret that big will cause anyone to go mad and crack. It is only a matter of time that Raskolnikov does come clean.