“‘There is no one – no one in the whole world now so unhappy as you!’ she cried in a frenzy…” She begins weeping.
“A feeling long unfamiliar to him flooded his heart and softened it at once. He did not struggle against it. Two tears started into his eyes and hung on his eyelashes.
‘Then you won’t leave me, Sonya?’ he said, looking at her almost with hope.
‘No, no, never, nowhere!’ cried Sonya. ’I will follow you, I will follow you everywhere…’”
But for a few moments she can not believe he did it and asks him how it could have happened. He in turn has moments when he regrets letting her know the truth. She asks him to explain why he did it and he struggles to give her answers. She has touched his heart and brought tears to his eyes but he still is far from true redemption which is only possible if she can influence him to follow the feelings of his heart and discover the love that exists in his soul.
He goes into a long ramble to explain why he did it. “‘And you don’t suppose that I went into it headlong like a fool? I went into it like a wise man and that was just my destruction…I wanted to murder without casuistry, to murder for my own sake, for myself alone!…It wasn’t to help my mother I did the murder…I wanted to find out something else; it was something else led me on. I wanted to find out then and quickly whether I was a louse like everybody else or a man. Whether I can step over barriers or not, whether I dare stoop to pick up or not, whether I am a trembling creature or whether I have the right…’
‘To kill? Have the right to kill?’ Sonya clasped her hands.
‘Ach, Sonia!’ he cried irritably and seemed about to make some retort, but was contemptuously silent.”
Sonia argues that he must go to the police and confess his guilt. But he has doubts about doing what she wants because at bottom he does not believe he is guilty. He has done the murder so intentionally, so rationally that guilt is impossible and redemption and divine forgiveness just as impossible. Sonya haunts him, following him in his movements around Petersburg whenever she can. Dostoevsky thus reverses the usual kind of haunting. Instead of the devil haunting a good soul, a good soul haunts a devil. She will not leave him ever. When Raskolnikov enters the police station finally to confess, he has second thoughts and leaves the building. Outside he sees Sonya standing not far from the entrance, “pale and horror-stricken. She looked wildly at him. He stood still before her. There was a look of poignant agony, of despair, in her face. She clasped her hands. His lips worked in an ugly, meaningless smile. He stood still a moment, grinned and went back to the police office.”