The Narrator is a ridiculous man, he is mad and utterly indifferent to everything and everyone. The narrator is a man who lost hope and direction in life, in fact he never had any hope or direction for since he was seven he was fully aware of his superfluous existence, and the conviction grew inside of him as he grew up until he could confront it, embrace its intensity and the freedom it came with, no one took him seriously, not even himself, he believed he was boring and everything he did stemmed not out of purpose, but from the lack of it. For instance he would knock passerby ‘s shoulders not because he didn’t notice them in particular, but because he stopped noticing people in general, for him nothing existed, and he had the permission to knock people’s shoulders simply because nothing matters.
On one night our adrift narrator on his way home, it was the gloomiest night possible, it was cold and damp after rainfall, he saw a star that stirred an idea in him, that he ought to shoot himself, he had a splendid revolved in his drawer, loaded for two months earlier, he had been waiting to be on the right state of mind to become zero, nothingness and be at peace at last, but one incident followed and it changed his life.
A little girl of about eight or nine took him by the elbow and begged for help for something awful happened to her mother, she cried out of despair, but he pushed her away with utter indifference and continued his way, and when he reached his room at last, he sat up in the old comfortable armchair where he sits until daybreak every night for a year, he sat there and put the revolved on the table, then he was overwhelmed by, first the realization that this is it and he is one shoot away from nothingness, and second he questioned why he suffered at not helping the girl, he felt guilty and inhumane for not helping her. He concluded that :
As long as I was still a human being not nothingness, I was alive and so could suffer, be angry, and feel shame at my actions
A reflection came rushing in his mind, while million others escaped his consciousness until he fell asleep. The dream he has is what will change his life forever, will reveal the truth to him bare. Afterwards when he told people of his dream they teased him saying it was just a dream, but for him yes indeed it was, just a dream, yet it revealed to him a different life, renewed life, grand and full of power, for their reality, their life the are so proud to have, he wanted to extinguish.
In his dream he had killed himself, and was buried in a cold damp grave as he had imagined, but the only thing that he didn’t expect is a life beyond the grave, he expected nonexistence and eternal peace, but as soon as he was buried he was transported through time and space by an alien being, human like being, to the star he saw on his way home, on that star he wrote :
It was the earth untarnished by the fall; on it lived people who had not sinned. They lived just in such a paradise as that in which, according to all legends of mankind, our first parents lived before they sinned; the only difference was that all this earth was the same paradise
The world he dreamed of, and the world he lived in were two different. The first was pure, innocent, untamed, and authentic, people lived in solidarity and harmony with nature, and with each others, they were a big happy family, they didn’t wait for science to know how to live, not did they worship any religion, they worshiped the unconditional love they had, they didn’t have jealousy, nor did they know the meaning the word conveyed. In the second world, wrath prevailed, jealousy and hatred, people found meaning in suffering and in their individuality, people draw limits, created illusion, and most importantly suffered for what the purity they had lost.
Dostoevsky suggest that the only living creatures in a sinful meaningless world that resembled the creatures he saw his dream are children, children are pure and innocent, authentic, but the more we grow we lose our virginal innocence for the things we attach to meaningfulness, for example religions or cultures, and slavery.
Dostoevsky, although lived in the 19th century, foresaw the events of the century that followed, he knew that the pace humans were taking to reach perfection could only lead to destruction, wrath, and inequality.
Here is an excerpt that for me sums up not only this short story, but life in general, the evolution of human sensuality.
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