Raskolnikov’s manner is now strange in a way different from what it was before. Before his manner was strange because of his silence and his need to be separate from people around him. Now his manner is strange because of the way he talks to people in his surroundings. His need to talk seems like perhaps the first steps from his former silent madness ruled by his mind towards the Marmeladov kind of madness that has its origin in human feeling. But in Dostoevsky’s understanding of psychology, the mind and the soul are enemies and neither show any mercy to the other until one gives in to the other and commits itself because of its defeat to be the other’s servant. Raskolnikov has felt a minor touch of compassion and pressed five kopecks into the hand of a girl. He has sent off words of feeling and poetry to the astonished ears of a stranger. Something is making him speak. What if this something continues to put pressure on him? What if it presses him not to just talk but to talk about it? He had but one thought earlier when he left his room. His complete thought was “that all this must be ended today, once for all, immediately; that he would not return home without it, because he would not go on living like that.” Raskolnikov like Marmeladov has now a need to get everything out in the open.
His wanderings this night through the Hay Market and other places around Petersburg where normal people are doing normal things trying to enjoy the evening include a series of accidents. He tries to get information from hucksters in the Hay Market who had dealings with Lizaveta. He speaks to a young man standing before a shop. But he makes no progress with his questions. The young man quickly tires of talking to him and directs him laughing to an eating-house saying “you’ll find princesses there too.…La,la”. He crosses a square and pushes his way into a dense crowd of peasants. “He felt an unaccountable inclination to enter into conversation with people. But the peasants took no notice of him; they were all shouting in groups together.” He wandered off silently to a marketplace that he knew well with dram shops and eating-houses. He saw women running in and out of various festive establishments. From one came the sounds of singing, the tinkling of a guitar and shouts of merriment. He passed a drunken soldier swearing and smoking a cigarette. A beggar was quarrelling with another beggar and a drunk was lying right across the road. Life, in other words, the bald unthinking life of real people, humans, is all around him. He is now in the midst of life unfolding not intentionally but accidentally. Two women speak to him seductively. One asks him for six kopecks for a drink and he gives her fifteen. A woman “pock-marked…covered with bruises with her upper lip swollen” but nonetheless alive and, so to speak, greedy to continue living to her last breath sets Raskolnikov to thinking about life. “‘Where is it,’ thought Raskolnikov. ‘Where is it I’ve read that someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he’d have only the room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once! Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!’” But Raskolnikov is still thinking not living and his thinking has him in such a firm grip that it will not allow him to live like those around him.