Breaking the five minute silence, Raskolnikov confesses to her that he has broken completely with his family. “‘I have only you now,’ he added. ‘Let us go together.…I’ve come to you, we are both accursed, let us go our way together!’”
“‘Go where?’ she asked in alarm and she involuntarily stepped back.” “‘How do I know? I only know it’s the same road, I know that and nothing more. It’s the same goal!’”
They go on talking feverishly back and forth, joined and separated, talking words that come from different centers of being. Sonya has read to him from the New Testament, read as a public confession the words of belief that Martha said to Jesus, words that she read as though they were her own and words that she read as though if Raskolnikov could say them as his own, his heart might open to love and he might believe. She said before him with religious feeling, “Yea, Lord: I believe that Thou art the Christ, the Son of God which should come into the world.”
But Raskolnikov will not say such words as his own. She asks him after talking much what is to be done.
“What’s to be done? Break what must be broken, once for all, that’s all, and take the suffering on oneself. What, you don’t understand? You’ll understand later…Freedom and power, and above all, power. Over all trembling creation and the antheap!…That’s the goal, remember that! That’s my farewell message.”
He is soon off away into the night after admitting to Sonya that he knows who murdered her friend Lizaveta and that if he comes back the next day, he will tell her who it is. But not for a moment does the idea enter her head that the murderer could be Raskolnikov. She is as extremely good in her thoughts as he is extremely bad in his.
He visits Sonya again at her room with the intention of confessing to her that he is the murderer of Lizaveta, her friend. But he is unable to confess the truth at once and instead tortures her with questions about who is worthy to live and who to die.
“‘You better say straight out what you want!’ Sonya cried in distress. ‘You are leading up to something again…Can you have come simply to torture me?’”
But he is still unable to speak the truth. He is in a kind of delirium. He leads up to the confession but does not confess. Finally he makes her guess the truth. She is shocked but abandoning him is as far from her mind as the awful truth is now solidly established in her mind.