The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

The girl that stops the narrator on the street to ask for help is eight years old and wears “a kerchief on her head” and “a wretched little dress all soaked with rain” (228). What particularly draws the narrator’s attention are “her wet broken shoes” (228). With indirect characterization, the broken shoes in particular suggest that the girl is poor. As the only direct description of her life and situation is that she is “in terror” (228) because—the narrator speculates—her mother might be dying, her role in the story is mostly symbolic: The narrator’s indifferent reaction to her despair emphasizes his unkind attitude toward everything. At the same time, her appearance is the turning point of the story, leading to the narrator’s changing his views.

The little girl’s arrival in his life is prefigured by the little star in the sky that he sees only moments before she approaches him. The star gives the narrator the idea to shoot himself that night; he writes that he doesn’t know why.

Dostoevsky was greatly affected by society’s sometimes sadistic treatment of children, and the girl is similar to other suffering children in Dostoevsky’s work. It is a significant motif in his writings: In The Brothers Karamazov, for example, Ivan doubts his faith in God for this reason. Ivan tells several stories about children who were tortured, sexually abused, forced to eat excrement, and kept worse than pigs on a farm, and then he asks Alyosha to fathom the hearts of such creatures who can’t even understand what’s being done to them. The girl in “The Dream of the Ridiculous Man” suffers from some unspecified yet terrible torment, and the man’s disregard for her frenzied suffering causes him to experience shame when he goes home that night and to acknowledge that he does feel compassion; these emotions seem to precipitate his dream and his “conversion.”