Crime and Punishment ends in a Siberian prison, with Raskolnikov falling weeping at Sonia's feet beside a river, the two deciding to wait out the seven years remaining of his sentence, and the narrator saying that a new story begins there, that of his renewal, which this book does not tell.
The Epilogue takes place nearly a year and a half after the crime. Raskolnikov serves eight years of second-category hard labor, a milder sentence than expected, because his sickly state, the theft he did not profit from, the confession, and the proofs of generosity gathered by Razumikhin weigh in his favor. His mother falls ill, is deceived by the family about her son's whereabouts, and dies shortly after Dunya's marriage to Razumikhin; Sonia follows the convoy and writes every month.
In prison, he falls ill from wounded pride and is shunned and then hated by the prisoners, who call Sonia "mother." In the hospital, he dreams of a plague in which each infected person thinks "the truth was contained in him, and in him alone." Convalescing, he sees Sonia standing by the gate and waits for her, uneasy, when she falls ill. On a clear morning, by the river, she sits beside him, their hands do not part, and he throws himself at her feet: "Love resurrected them."
At night, he takes Sonia's Gospel, which he keeps under his pillow, but does not open it. The book closes with "but here a new story already begins" and with the declaration that "our present tale is finished." Readers see in this the narrator's confidence in the change, or an admission that the novel, which followed every twist of the murderer's conscience, does not follow the one that would save him.