What has happened is that the distance between himself and “the extraordinary men” has been swiftly widening. Now it has become a terrifying gap, across which he stares back, horror-struck, at Napoleon. And by a stroke of irony this has occurred at the very point when he has been called upon, in a room full of curious listeners, to explain the theory he had stated in his article—an article which, so far as he had known until that instant, had never been published. Yet there it is, and Porfiry Porfirovich has read it, two months before.
Confronted with his theory, like a flesh-and-blood witness, and comparing it with his own behavior during and after the crime, he measures the immense space yawning between. His reaction, perhaps not strange, is pure hatred of Napoleon. The scorn boiling up in his wild, insensate laugh at the picture of the Emperor creeping under an old woman’s bed, though aimed at himself, at the absurdity of any comparison, spills over on Napoleon with blistering effect. By imagining the great man under a bed, on all fours, he reduces him to a creeping thing, a louse (his own word later) like himself and the rest of the race. Disconnected thoughts of Egypt, the pyramids (i.e., the monumental), add venom to his merriment. His hatred is double-edged, half for himself and half for the “genius” who encouraged him. With the mocking stress he lays on certain key words (“Master,” “forgets,” “wastes,” “all”), he is taunting Napoleon for his crimes—the very crimes that a few hours before were the slide-rule or gauge of his now loathsome greatness.
In that tirade, a little more than halfway through the novel, an idea is murdered, shockingly, before our eyes. From this point on, Raskolnikov’s theory (“no barriers”) is dead for him. He has strangled it and tossed it aside, contemptuously, and he has stuck pins into the waxen figure of Napoleon, which bleeds wax blood. Raskolnikov is not yet ready to subject himself to the moral law, but he has no compunction now in subjecting Napoleon to it.
This is not the final word we hear here of Napoleon and the all-is-permitted theory, inseparable companions, but, when next mentioned, they are spoken of historically, as relegated to the past. When Raskolnikov confesses the murders to Sonia, he tries to explain his reasons to her. But he has difficulty reconstructing them. He has to think back and query himself. Finally he decides. “I wanted to become a Napoleon, that is why I killed her. ...Do you understand now?” “N-no,” answers Sonia. He tries again, mentions Toulon, Egypt, becomes incoherent. “Well, I...murdered her, following his example. ...Perhaps that’s just how it was.” “You had better tell me straight out...without examples,” she says. Then he suggests that he did it from need, for his career, to make himself independent. Sonia is still not satisfied. At last he thinks he has it: “...for the first time an idea took shape in my mind which no one had ever thought of before me, no one!...I saw clear as daylight that not a single person living...has had the daring to go straight for it all and send it flying to the devil! I...I wanted to have the daring...and I killed her. ...That was the whole cause of it!”
In other words, Napoleon has taken a back seat. He is of no importance. Raskolnikov himself is the sole cause. And that, as far as I know, is the last appearance in fiction of Napoleon as ruling idea. After this, if we meet his avatars, immersed in the Mémorial or joying in his crimes, it will be in a madhouse.
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