Summary

The setting changes to Bella’s office, where there are “a desk and a few chairs” (13).

Meanwhile, the action is continuous as Bella continues to speak to the audience, using present-tense narration to describe a class she teaches in which students read well-known books, examine the techniques used, and do exercises that apply those techniques. Continuing to speak in academic, analytical language, she describes how she always starts with Crime and Punishment, commenting on how she admires how the author enables the reader to connect with the book’s murderous anti-hero, Raskolnikov This, she says, is because other characters connect with Raskolnikov, particularly young women – even though the hero’s victims are also women. Bella then describes how, during a discussion of the novel, one of her students – Christopher- expressed his intention to “‘write a moment like that’” (14). Bella says that the...