The author's point of departure is an article in The Hudson Review (1960) by W. D. Snodgrass. Wasiolek gives Snodgrass credit for suggesting that the pawnbroker was a displaced representative of the mother and that Raskolnikov, in killing the pawnbroker, was striking symbolically at his mother. However, Wasiolek contends that Raskolnikov's repressed erotism and hostility toward his mother is expressed more elaborately than Snodgrass suspected, and that Raskolnikov's motives become clearer as the displacement proceeds from mother to landlady to pawnbroker.