Discourse Theory and the Author-Reader Contract:

The change of the mode of narration from first person in the drafts to third person in the final version of Dostoevsky's novel Crime and Punishment has received surprisingly little attention from either literary critics1 or linguists. Yet the first-person drafts contain episodes depicting the same events as in Dostoevsky's final text, providing perfect laboratory conditions for exploring both the linguistic and the literary implications of the change. The reasons for the change of narrative mode are not immediately obvious. Dostoevsky employed first-person narration quite often. In some of his works the firstperson narrator plays the marginal role of a chronicler or confidant who bustles between characters, listens to their confessions, collects facts and rumours and puts them together for the reader (The Insulted and the Injured and to some extent The Brothers Karamazov). In others, the first-person narrator is a main character; in Dostoevsky's first epistolary novel, Poor Folk, there are two of them. Here also belong The Gambler, The Adolescent, The Meek One, Notes from Underground, White Nights, Netchka Nezvanova and others. It is highly improbable that Dostoevsky, an experienced master of this form, has abandoned first-person narration for the technical reasons suggested by a commentator: