The Cubicle

What It Is

The room of Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov at the top of a five-story building, which the narrator compares to a closet at the opening of the book and which his mother calls a coffin. It is small and low, with yellow wallpaper peeling off, and a sofa that takes up half its width. It is where the plan ripened, from where he sets out for the crime, and to where he returns without managing to stay. By contrast, the book sets other spaces: the Marmeladovs' passage room, the room of Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladova, the little hotel room of Arkady Ivanovich Svidrigailov, the Siberian barracks and, at the other extreme, the riverbank.

Where It Appears

In chapter I of Part One, in the opening of the book, the narrator says the little room lies just under the roof of a five-story house and looks more like a closet than a dwelling. Raskolnikov hurries down the stairs so as not to cross paths with the landlady.

In chapter II of Part One, the room of the family of Semyon Zakharovich Marmeladov is not a corner but the passage between the rooms of a noisy boardinghouse, and the children tremble in a corner while Katerina Ivanovna Marmeladova drags her husband by the hair.

In chapter III of Part One, on waking, Raskolnikov looks at the room with hatred: six paces long, yellow and dusty paper coming off the wall, a ceiling so low that a tall man feels he will hit his head. The torn sofa takes up almost one wall and serves as a bed. The narrator says he had withdrawn from everyone like a tortoise into its shell. After reading his mother's letter, he cannot breathe; the room seems to him a closet or a trunk, and the Russian says that the eye and the thought ask for room.

In chapter V of Part One, after the dream and the renunciation, he does not want to return to the room where the plan ripened. The Russian calls it a horrible closet and says that there, in that corner, the idea had grown for more than a month.

In chapter III of Part Two, in his fever, Dmitry Prokofich Razumikhin enters the room, hitting his forehead on the low ceiling.

In chapter IV of Part Two, on hearing from Nastasya that Lizaveta Ivanovna was also killed, Raskolnikov turns to the wall and fixes on an awkward flower in the dirty yellow wallpaper, counting leaves and marks.

In chapter V of Part Two, Pyotr Petrovich Luzhin looks at the room like a ship's cabin, cramped and low, and leaves stooping to pass through the low door.

In chapter VI of Part Two, in the old woman's apartment, now under renovation, the workmen have replaced the yellow paper with white paper with lilac flowers, and Raskolnikov feels an aversion he cannot explain. The paper that came off was yellow, like his own.

In chapter III of Part Three, his mother, Pulcheria Alexandrovna Raskolnikova, breaking the heavy silence of the visit, tells Rodya that his room is bad and looks like a coffin.

In chapter IV of Part Three, when Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladova looks at the room, Raskolnikov remarks that his mother also said it looked like a coffin, and she lets slip what she has seen: he gave them everything the day before.

In chapter I of Part Four, Arkady Ivanovich Svidrigailov imagines eternity as a single little room, like a village bathhouse, sooty, with spiders in every corner, and Raskolnikov feels a chill hearing him.

In chapter IV of Part Four, Sonia's room is large but very low, with the air of a shed, an irregular quadrilateral that a wall of three windows over the canal cuts diagonally, and with doors always locked to other apartments. Behind one of them Svidrigailov will hear the entire conversation. It is the closest the book comes to Raskolnikov's room.

In chapter IV of Part Five, explaining to Sonia how he came to the crime, Raskolnikov says that he shut himself in his corner like a spider, that low ceilings and cramped rooms crush the soul and the spirit, and that he hated that burrow.

In chapter V of Part Five, after the confession, he enters the room, looks at the dust and the window, and has never felt so alone.

In chapter I of Part Six, in the foggy days after the death of Katerina Ivanovna Marmeladova, the Russian repeats, for his state, the word of tightness he used for the room: ever since the scene of Mikolka in the office of Porfiry Petrovich, he has been suffocating with no way out, in a tight spot, already outside the room.

In chapter VI of Part Six, Arkady Ivanovich Svidrigailov rents, on his last night, a little room under the stairs of a wooden hotel, so small it hardly fits him, with torn yellow paper and a ceiling cut diagonally by the staircase, and with a thin wall that lets him hear the neighbors. He thinks he has become fussy about the place for an end like this.

In chapter I of the Epilogue, according to Sonia's letters, the prison barracks are shared by all and, she supposes, cramped, ugly and unhealthy, and he sleeps on a bunk over felt, without wanting to arrange anything better.

In chapter II of the Epilogue, sitting on logs at the riverbank, Raskolnikov looks at the wide, deserted shore and, across it, the nomads' yurts, where there seems to be freedom and other people, as if time had stopped in the centuries of Abraham. It is there, under the open sky, that Sonia reaches him.

What It Means

The room does two things in the book. It is the place where the idea grows without a witness, because the plan ripened there and it is from there that he sets out for the crime, and it is also the first punishment, a space too small for what he thinks of himself. What opposes it in the rest of the book are places with another person inside: Sonia's room, which has an equally low ceiling, the common barracks, and the riverbank, where there is space and there is Sonia. The rooms that correspond to his on Svidrigailov's side, the eternity of spiders and the hotel of the last night, are closed, with no one in them.

The low ceiling does not change, and what changes is who is in the room. In Sonia's, with its low ceiling and sharp corner, the reading of Lazarus happens in chapter IV of Part Four; in Svidrigailov's, under the stairs, there is a man who shoots himself in the morning; in Raskolnikov's, the closet of the book's opening, in chapter I of Part One, is the place he goes out from to the crime and returns to without being able to stay. Two readings of the tightness. In one, he is the cause: Raskolnikov tells Sonia, in chapter IV of Part Five, that low ceilings and cramped rooms crush the soul and the spirit, and the room produces the theory. In the other, it is a consequence: he had already withdrawn from everyone like a tortoise into its shell, in chapter III of Part One, before the room crushed him.

Relationships

• Default themes: Reason, Suffering.
• Themes in the novel: Reason, Suffering.
• Characters: Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladova, Arkady Ivanovich Svidrigailov, Dmitry Prokofich Razumikhin, Pyotr Petrovich Luzhin, Pulcheria Alexandrovna Raskolnikova, Katerina Ivanovna Marmeladova, Semyon Zakharovich Marmeladov, Lizaveta Ivanovna, Porfiry Petrovich.
• Related symbols: the resurrection of Lazarus, because Sonia's room is the space of the reading.