The ridiculous man has decided that nothing else matters to him. He sees no reason to continue living. He plans his death and buys a revolver, intending to shoot himself in the forehead. Yet the gun remains in his small apartment for two months while he waits for the right time to end his life.
Some people are lucky that life keeps giving them chances. Time and again. However, because life does what life does, others are not so lucky—life doesn't care enough to give them a chance to choose it. In The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, a short story by Fyodor Dostoevsky, the ridiculous man is so lucky that when he wants to end his life, it sends someone to keep him awake at night to reflect on his actions.
The story begins with him declaring himself ridiculous. Then, he reflects on how people laugh at him. He feels sad that they don’t know the truth. He admits that he knew he was a ridiculous man from the moment he was born and that, as he gained knowledge, he realised more and more just how ridiculous he was.
“Everyone laughed at me. But not one of them knew or guessed that if there were one man on earth who knew better than anybody else that I was absurd, and what I resented most of all was that they did not know that,” he writes.
I went back to the beginning, and it occurred to me that I am actually ridiculous myself, in so many ways. And, sadly, nobody knows my ridiculousness better than I do. The truth is, nobody really knows what the other person thinks or feels. Most of us are too focused on ourselves to care about others.
The ridiculous man has decided that nothing else matters to him. He sees no reason to continue living. He plans his death; he gets himself a revolver that he plans to shoot himself with in the forehead. The gun sits in his modest apartment for two months as he waits for the right time to take his life. I find this fascinating because his humanness keeps showing through his procrastinations. It made me think about my own procrastinations because I always believe that I have time.
On the gloomiest and darkest night after a rainy day, he sits with his friends, where nobody really cares whether he is there or not. A thought occurred to him: if the street lamps had been put out, it would have been less cheerless. “The gas made one’s heart sadder because it lit it all up,” he said. It occurred to me then that we all have things to hide. We worry about being truly seen. Because when someone truly sees us, we become vulnerable. We are too worried about being judged for who we really are, and so we hide behind the darkness and the walls we have created for ourselves.
As he looked at the sky, he saw one bright star. And it was that night that he decided to finally take his life. But life had other plans for him. Not long after, a little girl came running to him, crying and in need of help. He assumed that it could be that her mother was dying. But he does not bother himself to help that girl because there will be someone else to do it, he tells himself.
When he gets home, he puts his gun on the table, ready to let it all go. But he starts thinking about that little girl he didn't help. This is the point in the book at which it occurred to me, as it occurred to the Ridiculous Man, that at the end of the day, we are humans. You can tell yourself that you don’t care about anything, but you will care, feel pain, and reflect on your actions, even for a little bit, as long as you are human.
He hasn’t been able to fall asleep for the past two months. But as he reflected on his humanness, he fell asleep. And in his dream, he dreams about life after his death. This is how ridiculous life is. It plays by its own rules and timing. It is in this dream that he sees the truth that he believes many of us have forgotten.
In his dream, he sees how these other people live their lives. Everything is the same as on Earth, but these people live life differently. “They seemed to do nothing but admire one another. It was like being in love with each other, but an all-embracing, universal feeling.”
As he tells his dream, he realises that “people can be beautiful and be happy without losing their power of living on earth. I will not, and I cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of humankind.”
Life is a gift. Admiring nature is one place to start choosing it. Yes, it is full of injustices. Choose to be.
Jane Shussa is a digital communication specialist with a love for books, coffee, nature, and travel. She can be reached at [email protected].
