Talk:The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

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Begs for forgiveness?[edit]

From the article:

...and he gathers that there is a funeral and he is buried. After an indistinct amount of time in his cold grave, water begins to drip onto his eyelid. The narrator begs for forgiveness, and suddenly his grave is opened by an unknown and shadowy figure...

From the story:

And all at once, not with my voice, but with my entire being, I called upon the power that was responsible for all that was happening to me: 'Whoever you may be, if you exist, and if anything more rational that what is happening here is possible, suffer it to be here now. But if you are revenging yourself upon me for my senseless suicide by the hideousness and absurdity of this subsequent existence, then let me tell you that no torture could ever equal the contempt which I shall go on dumbly feeling, though my martyrdom may last a million years!'

The ridiculous man does not seem to be begging, at least not to me. The first portion of his statement ('Whoever you may be...suffer it to be here now) seems a little difficult to penetrate but could be interpreted as begging if he is thought to be saying something like 'if anything more rational (than being stuck in a dank coffin with a trickle of water slowly pouring down my face for eternity) is possible, (then I shall) suffer it to be here now.' However this begging, if begging it is, seems only to be a rhetorical device that augments the much more imaginative second portion of his statement ('But if you are...a million years!'), as though his pretenses of reasonability and rationality force him to use this structure of sentence (the very logical, if a then b else if c then d, sort of style) and to place a little 'you have the right to...' preamble before he opens fire.

I looked at the discussion page for exactly this reason. When i was reading the story i got the impression that he is angry at the "unknown power" and doesn't regret his actions. Also, here is a link of the story http://www.online-literature.com/dostoevsky/3368/ . I am not sure if its allowed it, so i will leave someone more experienced to edit the page. VeNSe (talk) 00:58, 29 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I have tried (unfortunately, 12 years after this thoughtful comment) to make the summary more reflective of the text, and have inserted the link to online-literature. Harold the Sheep (talk) 04:28, 4 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]