What's this story about?
There's a bet. Several men are debating the merits of capital punishment versus life imprisonment. One young lawyer says that he is willing to live in solitary confinement for the two million the banker offers. It's unclear to me why the lawyer ups the stakes to fifteen years when he could have gotten the same money for five years.
There is an agreement and the lawyer goes to live in solitary confinement. By himself, he reads all kinds of books and in the end he becomes a cynic. He decides to leave hours ahead of the agreed time and therefore lose the bet.
Why?
I don't know. I can only guess here.
What's happened to the lawyer in those fifteen years? He's read a lot -- has acquired a lot of knowledge -- his values have changed and he no longer values money like he once did.
He's turned against humanity. Maybe that's what he had to do to survive. He had to renege all association with other people. All he had to help him evaluate existence was books.
What we see here is that all book knowledge is just book knowledge -- what keeps us going -- what keeps us healthy are not ideas or knowledge from books but our interaction with each other. Can you really learn, like the lawyer says he learned, from a book about love?
What makes this existence bearable is that we have each other. Yes, maybe Sartre is right and "Hell is other people" but people are what makes us keep living. Alone -- detached -- we lose our grip -- life ultimately becomes meaningless. So what we need to become truly happy and satisfied is to develop good relationships with other people.
It's also quite reasonable to assume that the lawyer just went insane. And he doesn't even know he's insane. How could he? It's not like he could Skype with Sigmund Freud.
There is one more explanation -- everything the lawyer concludes is true -- we do take lies for truth -- and maybe everything is meaningless -- after all no matter what we think or do the sun will eventually blow up and we will all disappear (unless of course in two billion years we find a hospitable planet in another solar system) -- but looking at life and seeing it for what it really is -- shouldn't make us give up -- or should it?
Samuel Beckett puts it best in the last lines of Waiting For Godot:
Vladimir: Well? Shall we go?
Estragon: Yes, let's go.
[they do not move]
The other part of the story is what happens to the banker in the fifteen years. He goes on doing what he does -- but he's lost a lot of his fortune -- and finally he considers committing murder.
So who is wiser? Who has made the most of the fifteen years -- the freed banker or the jailed lawyer?
And who was truly free? The banker who was enslaved to a hedonistic lifestyle or the lawyer who was on a personal journey of discovery?
Who really won the bet?
[they do not move]
The other part of the story is what happens to the banker in the fifteen years. He goes on doing what he does -- but he's lost a lot of his fortune -- and finally he considers committing murder.
So who is wiser? Who has made the most of the fifteen years -- the freed banker or the jailed lawyer?
And who was truly free? The banker who was enslaved to a hedonistic lifestyle or the lawyer who was on a personal journey of discovery?
Who really won the bet?
I just wonder where the lawyer will go.
Ashram, anyone?
The banker and the lawyer haven't really changed in fifteen years. That's the twist.
ReplyDeleteAt the beginning, the banker is described as spoiled, frivolous, reckless. Fifteen years later, after dissipating his wealth from most likely similar reckless gambles and bad investments, we find him recklessly intending to commit murder for money. Double murder if you include the watchman, who he anticipates will be blamed. The banker weeps at his contempt for himself and his life. He realizes who and what he is and always will be.
Superficially, the lawyer appears to have become a nutty misanthrope through all his book learning. But, you have to ask what kind of person would accept such a bet in the first place? And, as you point out, he needlessly extends from five to fifteen years. Doesn't he have any lovers or a single family member? It seems he's all alone in the world. He disdains the world going in and, after fifteen years, disdains the world coming out. You believe that he becomes a cynic, but I think he's been a cynic from the outset. His conclusion isn't that money is the root of all evil. It's that he despises everything, which includes money.
It's trendy when thinking about stories to use the phrase, "character arc." Chekhov is actually saying that character is destiny.