The Idiot ends with Nastasya's death, Rogozhin's sentence, and the prince's return to the Swiss sanatorium, where he no longer recognizes anyone.
On the day of the wedding, at the door of Darya Alexeyevna's house, Nastasya Filippovna sees Rogozhin in the crowd, runs to him and cries: "Save me! Take me away! Wherever you like, now!" The prince, in the church, receives the news and says that, "in her state... this is perfectly in the order of things."
The next day, the prince looks for the two of them around the city. Rogozhin finds him in the street, fifty paces from the hotel, and takes him to the house on Gorokhovaya Street, where he shows him Nastasya dead under an oilcloth: he killed her with the knife. The two of them spend the night beside the body, and the prince "lightly touched his head, his hair, stroking it and stroking his cheeks... he could do nothing more!"
In the Conclusion, Rogozhin, after two months of fever, is sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor; Hippolyte dies two weeks after Nastasya; Aglaya marries a false Polish count; and the prince returns to Schneider's sanatorium. The narrator closes the prince's story with the word of the title, imagining the doctor saying again, "as he did back then," Idiot! There are two readings: a clinical diagnosis, or the world's judgment on a goodness that saved no one.