Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, whom his mother and sister call Rodya, is the protagonist of the novel: a poor former student from St. Petersburg who kills the pawnbroker Alyona Ivanovna and, by accident, her sister Lizaveta, in order to find out which side of a division of humanity he belongs to.
He lives in an attic cubicle that seems more like a closet than a room, and he owes his lodging to his landlady. He left the university for lack of money and, half a year earlier, wrote an article dividing people into ordinary and extraordinary. His mother and sister sacrifice themselves for him: the letter he reads at the beginning says that Dunya has agreed to marry Luzhin, and he reads it as the sale of his sister to support him.
The book shows him divided. In the dream, he weeps over a beaten mare; he leaves the copper coins he has left on the windowsill of the family of a drunkard he barely knows and, later, gives all the money he has for that man's funeral. At the same time he upholds the theory in the abstract, draws back when asked whether he himself would overstep the law, and says alone, in fever: "It was not a person I killed, it was a principle!" Razumikhin describes him to his mother as someone who sometimes seems cold and insensitive, "as if two opposite characters alternated in him."
Readers disagree about him. For some, he is a man seized by a split between the reason that builds the theory and the core that never stopped valuing life, and madness is the price of acting on one's own idea. The Epilogue's court also treats him as a clinical case, speaking of a passing mental disturbance, and the narrator remarks that the newest fashionable theory arrived just in time. For others, he is lucid the whole time, and the oscillation between motives is the way he discovers himself without knowing why he killed. The text supplies material for both readings.