It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive. You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It is through these books that he achieves enlightenment, harkening back to Lord Buddha’s enlightenment under the Bodhi tree or Lord Jesus’ fasting in the desert for forty days. The lawyer is in love with his books, those thousands of books he read in the time frame of fifteen years. Books were the lawyer’s only companions to aid him in a deeper understanding of humanity, the reality about life, the frivolousness of life, the hopelessness of a permanent improvement in mankind, and such other lofty topics of the mind, heart, and soul. Those books teach him all there is to know about life and helps him toward the process of self-realization or self-actualization. He reads a great number of books while he lives out those fifteen years in the confines of one of the rooms in the banker’s lodge. The young lawyer spends fifteen years in solitary confinement just to prove a point. I want to draw your attention to the fact that this story is not merely about greed but is about the hypocrisy of life itself. The banker by the way prefers the death penalty to life imprisonment.
The banker stakes two million stating in his excited state that the lawyer was wrong to think one could survive in solitary confinement for so long a time. In this story, he voluntarily goes into solitary confinement to prove a baseless point against the rich banker the point being that life imprisonment was any day better than the death penalty for criminals. This is ironic because at the end of the story, one of the characters through their letter brings out the whole frivolity of life itself. Intellectual topics are being discussed and there is no sign of frivolity in the atmosphere. At this party are many intellectuals, journalists, lawyers, and their like. The party has been given by a rich banker with an excited temperament.
‘The Bet’ by Anton Chekhov begins at a party where the death penalty is being discussed.
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