The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

The narrative has the form of a monologue spoken by the ridiculous man. At times it resembles a dramatic monologue, and this formal device introduces the theme of Language, Lying, and Communication. The man’s story can be divided into three parts: the misery of his nihilist past, the turning point when his suicide is thwarted by the encounter with the girl, and the salvation he experiences as a result of his dream-vision of a good world. The idea that ties the story and its structure together is the narrator’s experience of being ridiculous. He is ridiculous both before and after his transformation, even though he has apparently completely changed. In the beginning of the story, as the narrator recalls his youth, he explains that being ridiculous used to bother him, especially the fact that other people who laughed at him didn’t understand that he was well aware of it himself: “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, it was myself, and what I resented most of all was that they did not know that” (226).

The narrator doesn’t clearly state what he means by being ridiculous or what exactly made other people think this way and laugh at him. Later in the first chapter, it is suggested that at this point in his life, it is his nihilism that amuses other people. When the narrator spends an evening with his friends and shares with them his impression of them not really caring about the topic of the heated discussion despite showing excitement, his friends start to laugh: “They were not offended, but they all laughed at me. That was because I spoke without any note of reproach, simply because it did not matter to me. They saw it did not, and it amused them” (227). His indifferent attitude to life is what sets him apart from the others and makes him ridiculous.

The narrator, as he explains, is well aware of this. In his young adulthood, he had already developed a strong conviction that nothing mattered and nothing even existed: “I suddenly felt that it was all the same to me whether the world existed or whether there had never been anything at all: I began to feel with all my being that there was nothing existing” (226). As a result, the narrator stops caring for other people and acts out aggression toward them. He says, “Indeed this showed itself even in the pettiest trifles: I used, for instance, to knock against people in the street” (226). At this point in his life, the narrator is stuck in a vicious circle. The more he feels like nothing matters, the more he is isolated from other people, which then deepens his misery. The narrator, however, has decided that this must be the truth, and he doesn’t seem interested in exploring other options until the encounter with the little girl forces him to reconsider his beliefs.

This encounter marks the turning point in the story and its interest in Resolving Nihilism. Whereas the narrator’s distant past is described only briefly, the events leading up to the turning point—the events of “last November”—are recounted in great detail, which underscores their importance. The sequence begins with a striking statement: “And it was after that that I found out the truth” (227). Although the narrator does not explicitly say so, the implication is that when the narrator learned the “truth,” it was an advance on his earlier nihilist outlook on life, already described.

When the narrator sits down in his armchair after the encounter, he must acknowledge the fact that he does care about people—that underneath his cynical attitude, there is still compassion. At this stage, the narrator is unable to fully grasp this idea, but it does show up in the questions he asks himself, “Why was it that all at once I did not feel that nothing mattered and was sorry for the little girl?” (230). As if starting to doubt his whole belief system, the narrator is now not entirely sure of what awaits him after death, either. In the moment he yells at the girl, the narrator feels that he is free to do so, as “—for in another two hours everything will be extinguished” (231). But sitting in his room, “a strange reflection” (231) comes to his mind. He starts to ponder whether shameful actions committed in one planet, for example, Mars, would matter in another planet, like Earth. This question is an allusion to the afterlife and to whether he would be judged for his actions after death. There is a clear change from the idea of death being the end of everything to the possibility of judgment in the afterlife. The narrator is, in short, questioning all his moral and philosophical beliefs. He has not yet realized the truth that he mentioned earlier, but the self-reflective questions distract him from the misery that made him want to take his own life.

Psychologically, dreams are the brain’s way of processing and organizing information that might have been suppressed during the day. Similarly, the dream of the narrator reveals to him what he already has understood on some level—what he pondered in his armchair before falling asleep. The utopian land he visits in his dream shows the narrator that the harsh conditions of modern society are not a given and that it is possible to live life from a place of love, compassion, and kindness. As the utopian land is corrupted, it begins to resemble modern society: The people invent the concepts of “justice,” of “honor,” the guillotine, and slavery. The people also consider themselves superior for prioritizing science and knowledge. The story of the downfall of this harmonious people contains a critique of the spirit of the times and suggests that relying only on rationalism and the idea of progress is actually distancing humanity from peaceful life.

Whereas the first part of the narrator’s dream is a description of a utopia, the second part describes the “Fall” into contemporary society. The corrupted people, once they become selfish, isolated, and combative, build temples where they “worshipped their own idea, their own desire” (234). They worship the legend of their past innocence. Fyodor Dostoevsky suggests that religion itself is flawed and a product of this Fall. As a solution to conflict and suffering, the people start to strive for a “rational society,” and they consider this wisdom (245). All in all, the dream suggests that humanity does not necessarily have the right idea about wisdom and truth—it has actually furthered itself from the truth, which causes misery, like in the case of the narrator.

The narrator understands that despite these conditions of the modern society, the meaning of life is found in being kind on the basis of this faith in goodness and beauty even if we can never achieve them in the world: “Suppose that this paradise will never come to pass (that I understand), yet I shall go on preaching it” (247). The Possibility of Utopia is worth “preaching,” even when it is understood to be impossible. Then, evoking the New Testament, the narrator says that his new life is devoted to “spreading the good tidings,” which consists in the dictum “to love others like yourself.”

As he preaches this new-found truth, he knows that people continue to laugh at him as they did before. This time, however, they are laughing at what is the complete opposite of what they found amusing in the past. The narrator is no longer nihilistic and cynical, but loving, caring, and perhaps naïve in their eyes: “And it is just this faith of mine that they laugh at” (247). The narrator is still ridiculous—this doesn’t change even though the narrator goes through the journey of development. He is still unreconciled and perhaps unreconcilable to the norms of ordinary society. However, the reasons for this have changed, and being ridiculous now is a positive experience: “But now I do not resent it, they are all dear to me now, even when they laugh at me” (225).