30 pages • 1 hour read
Fyodor DostoevskyThe Dream of a Ridiculous Man
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1877A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Resolving Nihilism
The narrator displays signs of anxiety, depression, and anti-social behavior; he describes these psychological phenomena as the sign and substance of his awareness that life is meaningless. He even goes so far as to say that nothing really exists. These parallel ideas—that there is no meaning, that there is nothing at all—are hallmarks of nihilism, from Latin nihil, meaning nothing. Nihilism became both a topic of intellectual debate and a serious personal concern for many in Russia in the 1860s following the publication of Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. Some critics have thought that Turgenev coined the word, although it is attested before him. The ridiculous man adopts nihilism with gusto, a response—the story suggests—to his deep existential dread.
The man describes having felt miserable already in his youth, being somewhat of a social outcast: Everyone laughs at him because of his ridiculousness, and the narrator is too proud to share his feelings with others. In his opinion, it is his pride and incapability to communicate that eventually lead to suicidal thoughts: “This pride grew in me with the years; and if it had happened that I allowed myself to confess to any one that I was ridiculous, I believe that I should have blown out my brains the same evening” (226).
When the narrator reaches adulthood, he becomes “calmer,” even though he understood his “awful characteristic more fully every year” (226). At this point, he starts to feel especially miserable and develops his belief in nihilism: “The conviction that had come upon me that nothing in the world mattered. […] I began to feel with all my being that there was nothing existing” (226). This brings him a kind of relief, but only temporarily. It allows him to stop caring about people, or so he thinks. The belief that he doesn’t care is belied by his anger and aggression: He begins to behave angrily and rudely with strangers in the street. Moving on to adulthood, his anguish takes a new form: The narrator goes from being horrified at the thought of others knowing his feelings to not caring at all, while his misery and sense that life lacks meaning deepens.
The reasons behind the narrator’s existential dread are not explicitly stated. Certain details of his dream imply that life in the narrator’s contemporary society does not provide grounds for meaningful existence. In the beginning of the story, the narrator mentions that he studied sciences at the university. He also mentions that he is “an up-to-date Russian progressive and contemptible Petersburger” (238). In his dream, once the people become corrupted, they start praising science: “But we have science, and by means of it we shall find the truth and we shall arrive at it consciously” (244). The irony of this statement is that even though the people believe that with science they have reached a new level of wisdom, they have actually drifted away from it. In this way, the story suggests that the narrator feels empty and anguished because a rationalist and utilitarian approach to life and striving for progress are not sufficient for finding deep meaning or purpose in one’s life.
Waking up, the narrator is able to abandon nihilism. He understands that he does not have to abide by society’s values, and he can instead believe in love and compassion, as he saw in his dream. He sees that his former self lacked responsibility and lacked gratitude: “—in my ingratitude, I quenched my life with a bullet in my heart” (236). Even though he realizes that he is still an outsider—still “ridiculous” to the society around him—he is committed and faithful to his new purpose and to the vision of the good that was shown to him in his dream.
Possibility of Utopia
A utopia is an imaginary, perfect society. Many authors have described utopias in their works, and Fyodor Dostoevsky does so in the form of the narrator’s dream. Dostoevsky’s attitude toward utopian projects was complicated. He was a socialist revolutionary as a young man who was sent to Siberia as punishment. He was nearly executed by a firing squad in what turned out to be a charade or sham execution intended to terrify the victims. Reportedly, among those subjected to this psychological torture, one went insane and another died by suicide. Dostoevsky survived, but he suffered greatly from the experience. He emerged from his imprisonment with a profound awareness of the sadism of humankind.
Although Dostoevsky lost faith in the socialist political project, he developed a fervent belief, perhaps paradoxically, in the possibility (and difficulty) of perfect Christian love and a society founded on it. The utopia in “The Dream of the Ridiculous Man” is understood by most critics to represent a kind of Christian utopian vision—the paradise before the Fall. It is a vision worth admiring and “preaching,” as the narrator calls his activity, even though it is unattainable in the narrator’s own estimation. (A minority critical view holds that the utopia is a delusion and the being that shows it to the man is a demon.)
The first thing the narrator notices about the prelapsarian community is its beauty and quality of transfiguration: “Oh, everything was exactly as it is with us, only everything seemed to have a festive radiance, the splendour of some great, holy, triumph attained at last” (237). The people are also beautiful: “Their faces were radiant with the light of reason and fullness of a serenity that comes of perfect understanding…” (237). The people are even able to understand the trees: “[I]t was as though they were talking with creatures like themselves” (239). The same goes for animals, too.
Besides their connection to nature, the people are very connected to each other and form a tight-knit spiritual community. Love reigns supreme, and they all live as a big family: “[T]hey seemed to do nothing but admire one another. It was like being in love with each other, but an all-embracing, universal feeling” (241). The narrator notes that they have a way about them that makes it impossible for him to experience envy or resentment in their presence. He feels love and care that never makes him self-conscious and doesn’t inspire self-doubt. In conclusion, in this story, Dostoevsky’s utopia is a world where people respect and love each other and all things in a spiritually advanced state of knowledge and wisdom.
After the narrator wakes up from the dream, he preaches its message. What he saw in his dream might never become reality, but the narrator will continue to spread this message regardless. Even though the utopia might never be attained, this does not mean that people should not ponder and strive for a harmonious life.
Though the existentialist point of view stresses the individual’s freedom of choice, the utopian dream reveals that Dostoevsky’s goal is not to put all the responsibility on the individual—he also criticizes the conditions of his contemporary culture and society. If an individual fails to find a meaningful purpose, which can be hard to do in the modern world, it can make them fall into melancholy and eventually lead to desperate acts. To the narrator, fixing this would be, in theory, an easy task. If everyone chose to love and accept one another, this would create a more utopian society, an idea the narrator expresses in the story’s last lines: “If only everyone wants it, it can all be arranged at once” (248).
Language, Lying, and Communication
The tale of the ridiculous man is notable for its monologic character. The narrator’s voice is never abrogated, and no other points of view are given. This raises questions about the narrator’s reliability. Furthermore, the monologue has an almost dramatic form. One of the places where this is most evidently productive of meaning is when the narrator backtracks to confess that he was wasn’t being truthful: He states that he was responsible for the corruption of the prelapsarian society in his dream. This occurs at the end of Chapter 4, when he states, “Oh, judge for yourselves: hitherto I have concealed it, but now I will tell the truth. The fact is that I … corrupted them all!” (247). He then claims that he doesn’t know how, but he is sure it was his fault. Later, he again draws attention to his struggle to speak truthfully and his confession at the end of the story, reminding the reader, “At first I meant to conceal the fact that I corrupted them, but that was a mistake…my first mistake” (247). The characterization of lying as his “first mistake” is significant: It suggests that lying is a sort of original sin. He writes that “the truth” whispered to him that he was lying and so he corrected himself. This, he says, is how things will go in his new role as a “preacher” or witness to the “truth.”
Before this, there is strong evidence that the narrator is thinking on his feet—or rather, talking that way—and that he has large gaps in his self-knowledge. Recounting his youthful anguish, the narrator says he became calmer as he grew older “for some unknown reason” (266). He then thinks out loud about what he just said: “I say ‘unknown,’ for to this day I cannot tell why it was. Perhaps it was owing to…” (227). As the narrator speaks, he discovers or reveals that it was his turn to nihilism, the conviction that nothing mattered, that relieved his soul (at least temporarily). The narrator’s monologue thus appears as an unfolding of his somewhat confused thoughts taking shape as he speaks.
The in-process quality to the narrator’s thinking is emphasized again in the last paragraph, where he returns to his “mistaken” decision to conceal his role as the corrupting influence in the dream society. He dilates on this: “I shall make some slips no doubt, and perhaps talk in second-hand language, but not for long: the living image of what I saw will always be with me and will always correct and guide me” (247). Just as he corrected himself when telling the story, he says that he will no doubt err and struggle to speak correctly in the future.
The idea that he will fall back on “second-hand language” to communicate the “good tidings” that he wants to tell the world contrasts with the unmediated communication and the unmediated access to the truth possessed by the prelapsarian people of his dream. They know without science and they converse effortlessly and apparently without actual words, even with plants: “Yes, they had found their language, and I am convinced that the trees understood them” (239).
In his diary, Dostoevsky once wrote, “Once you have begun to speak, it’s just impossible not to lie.” This awareness colors his characterization of the narrator, just as the narrator reflects on his struggle to be truthful. This problem, pointedly, doesn’t affect the perfected beings of paradise.
Finally, the narrator’s struggles with language appear as a need to keep talking. Again, toward the story’s end, he says that even though he might talk in second-hand language, he will “go on and on” (246). The apparent nobility of his commitment to speak the “good tidings” is ironically undercut by the phrase, which is repeated at the very end of the story when it devolves into an excited “and… and…”: “And I tracked down that little girl…and I shall go on and on!” (247).
The struggles with language and with truth-speaking that Dostoevsky thematizes in the story should discourage readers from seeing “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man” as merely a didactic parable, albeit one with psychological or philosophical complexity. Rather, Dostoevsky’s narrative art works in tandem with his acute psychological insight and philosophical depth.
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