Crime and Punishment
Raskolnikov's mind is the first truly modern interior in fiction: guilty, rationalizing, disintegrating. Dostoyevsky invented psychological interiority here. The novel remains among the most taught and most debated works in world literature because its central question (can a superior man justify murder?) never stops being urgent.
"My crime was buying the book and my punishment was reading it." The company is the problem: five hundred pages locked in with a man one review inventories as "utterly unlikable: smug, arrogant, temperamental, condescending and self-delusional," whose famous theory turns out to be a sophomore's napkin sketch. The interior monologue cycles until one reader's running notes compress whole chapters to "Hysteria! Drink! Hysteria! Drink!" Everyone answers to three names. Everyone inexplicably adores him, though "in real life, people would have avoided him like the plague." The change of heart near the close arrives abrupt and unbuilt, and the narrator's sour asides about Jewish characters stay in the text no matter which translation you buy.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
