“Crime and Punishment” (Part One) by Fyodor Dostoevsky: Raskolnikov babbles, and often returns home with amnesia for the route he has taken

Babbles

Raskolnikov says to himself “I babble too much…That’s why I don’t do anything, because I babble. However, maybe…I babble because I don’t do anything. I’ve learned to babble…thinking about…cuckooland…Am I really capable of that? Is that something serious? No, not serious at all. I’m just toying with it, for the sake of fantasy. A plaything! Yes, a plaything, if you like!” (1, p. 4).

Is that the same personality who, later in Part One, actually kills two women with an ax?

And when he says to himself, “Yes, a plaything, if you like,” who is “you”? Is it an artifact of the translation, a linguistic habit, or one of his alternate personalities? (Persons with multiple personality rarely have only two personalities.)

Fugue

“It had happened to him many times before that he would arrive at home, for example, having absolutely no recollection of which way he had come, and he had already grown used to going around that way” (1, p. 46).

Traveling some place, but having no memory for how you got there, is a dissociative fugue, a common symptom in multiple personality (a.k.a. dissociative identity).

When traveling is not involved, but the person does not remember what happened during a period of time, it is simply a memory gap, a cardinal symptom of multiple personality.

The explanation is that the regular personality has no memory for what happened when one or more alternate personalities were in control. Thus, if you know the person’s alternate personalities, you can ask them, and they can tell you what happened.

1. Fyodor Dostoevsky. Crime and Punishment: A Novel in Six Parts with Epilogue [1866]. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York, Vintage Classics/Random House, 1993.