english lang extract analysis

In this extract the narrator has just murdered two people in a fourth-floor flat with an axe. He is almost disturbed by a group of men and is now trying to make his escape down the stairs.

Crime and Punishment: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

But at that very instant several men, speaking loud and fast, began tramping up the stairs. There were three or four of them. He recognised the young lad’s booming voice. ‘It’s them!’

In total despair he made straight for them: ‘What will be, will be! I’m ruined if they stop me, ruined if they let me pass: they’ll remember.’ They were about to meet; just one flight of stairs between them – when suddenly, salvation! A few steps away from him, to the right, an apartment stood empty and open, that same second-floor apartment which the workmen had been painting and which, as if on purpose, they’d now vacated. So that was them running out just now with such a hue and cry. The floors had just been painted; in the middle of the room stood a vat and a pot with paint and a brush. He darted through the open door in a flash and hid on the other side of the wall, in the very nick of time: they were already on the landing. Then they turned to carry on up to the fourth floor, talking loudly. He waited for them to go past, walked out on tiptoe and ran off down.

No one on the stairs! Or at the gates. He passed quickly under the arch and turned left down the street.

He knew full…