Accounting for One's Future by Sara

Accounting for One's Future by Sara - February 2015 Scholarship Essay

Stories connect humanity and provide us insight into life, but few quite like Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. The novel displays the bitterly solid relationship between actions and consequences, consequences not just via enforcement of a punishment, but from ourselves. Understanding and accepting this part of life is a key step in adulthood; therefore, introducing Crime and Punishment and all its complexity ought to be used as a tool to aid adolescents’ entrance into the real world.

One of life’s most important but also most difficult lessons to learn is the repercussions of one’s actions. Adults with decades of experience have not acquired or may even have chosen to forget this reality. Even greatly successful people have fallen prey to this neglect. Successful people like Pixar and Disney president Ed Catmull, a computer whiz who was key to the advancement of computer animation in the film industry. In the 1980’s through to 2000, Catmull, along with nearly all of the heads of the major animation studios, made a “gentlemen’s agreement” to fix artists’ income so their employees would not leave a studio to take a better paying job. By fixing these peoples’ income Catmull violated the Sherman anti-trust act, and it would seem was only thinking ahead by a few years, ignoring not only its effects on his employees but its later possible repercussions on him. A similar lack of foresight may be seen in Raskolnikov when he decides he wants to get away with murder. He thoroughly thinks through what he could logically do, he even has luck on his side when he commits the crime, but he never considers the guilt that comes with taking a life. A lack of foresight which leads to his downfall: Raskolnikov confesses his crimes to the authorities out of guilt.

Arguably there is no way someone could consider all of what may unfold after they act. No matter how little or how much a person prepares, they must always live with what they choose to do. The character Svidrigailov’s end in Crime and Punishment is a good example of this. A rich man, Svidrigailov is an unsavory character of little character. Svidrigailov harassed Raskolnikov and Raskolnikov’s sister with his knowledge of Raskolnikov’s crime, seemed to have murdered his wife, and was a child molester. He was despicable through almost the entire story, though he could be charitable, and in the end he committed suicide out of guilt and loneliness. As different a situation Catmull’s is he also did not consider the repercussions of his actions, at least not enough to prevent getting busted for it decades later. Both cases show the responsibility one is given as a person, that we are not only solely accountable for ourselves but must live with ourselves, a reality many of us have difficulty facing.

Dostoevsky’s classic may serve as a warning to students who have yet to enter the world outside of high school. Many of us, in fact most receive some form of help at the beginning of adulthood and onwards, but nothing quite compares with the learning experience of our own mistakes. Hopefully, reading Crime and Punishment will plant a seed in students’ minds as it did in mine, about the concept of living with the guilt of thoughts and actions that have gone unpunished. Whether it be something as disreputable as wage-fixing or terrible as murder, it is only ourselves we are left with at the end of the day.