Healing East to West the Term Paper

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If money was his motivation, this hardly seems like a logical way to proceed. This also undercuts the idea that there was premeditation of how to use the funds, as he had no evident plot to hide the goods or to fence them. His actions after the murder actually highlight his delusional and confused state of mind.

The prosecution has called Raskolnikov's subsequent feverish illness evidence of remorse, and evidence of his knowledge that his actions were wrong. Immediately after committing the crime, including the unexpected murder of the woman's sister, he took to his bed, raving, according to his friends and family, like a lunatic. This supports, however, the idea that Raskolnikov was suffering a mental and physical illness that inhibited his ability to discern right from wrong. Friends and neighbors of the accused note that before the crimes took place he was taken to wandering the streets at night, often muttering to himself, with a dazed, seemingly insane expression.

In1843 Daniel McNaughtan harbored the delusion that Prime Minister was persecuting and stalking him. He then in turn stalked and killed the man's secretary, whom he mistook for the Prime Minister. The jury found him not guilty by reason of insanity because he suffered from paranoid as delusions (Freedman 1983). This delusion seems to parallel Raskolnikov's own, whereby Raskolnikov fixated on the pawnbroker as an evil representation of all his problems, of all the world's ills. The defendant was convinced that his validation as a worthy man would be established, if she was dead, and this would free his family and the world. How could he possibly be worthy of his sister's and mother's love, except if he were a Napoleon? In his brain-feverish state he also believed that he could use what he stole to help others, help the world, again, with delusions of moral grandeur.

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The monetary nature of his difficulties only had an impact upon his state of mind, as he thought and the wealth of the pawnbroker would set the poor of the world free. He did not even have the logic and premeditation to hatch a plot that would effectively gain him monetary profit from his actions. The action of killing the woman's sister was generated by the confused state of mind at the time of the crime. The laws created in Naughtan's name state that a person is insane if: "at the time of the committing of the act, the party accused was laboring under such defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing; or if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong" (Freedman 1983:173). This student's bearing, his interactions with others, and his evident dissociation, vouched by all of those around him who knew him before the murders, confirm this about his demeanor. The fact that this was uncharacteristic of his usual comportment was also vouched form. This, Raskolnikov's sense of moral error was entirely eclipsed by his mental and physical illness. Prison will do nothing to rehabilitate this man's crime; he needs the help of an asylum, not the prison of Siberia.

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