Material Existence And Ignorance In The Bet By Anton Chekhov

Some people want to lose all of their human characteristics. Whether it is replacing a body part with a robotic one to become a cyborg, or enhancing their senses with external supplements, the possibilities are endless as mankind strives to phase out of its natural form. But maybe there’s another way to lose humanity. In “The Bet”, Anton Chekhov decides to go a different route to change somebody human into a cold, calculating being. By making a bet and putting a lawyer into fifteen years of solitary confinement, the banker, without a clue, strips the lawyer of his humanity. As the lawyer is in prison, different changes happen to him and several themes arise. In “The Bet”, Anton Chekhov discusses the theme of material existence and ignorance through the passage of

Ignorance is the term used to describe someone who doesn’t know about something. Ignorance may sound familiar as it is used in the proverb, “Ignorance is Bliss”. According to the dictionary, “Not knowing something is often more comfortable than knowing it” (Dictionary 1). The banker lacks the knowledge of the prisoner, and he lacks the prisoner’s time and ability to think over materialism, but the banker has what the prisoner doesn’t, which is emotion. The two characters are both ignorant in their own ways. The prisoner lacks emotional depth while the banker lacks intelligence. Whoever is right is up to the reader and their own views on life. Through the prisoner’s passage of fifteen years in solitary confinement, the author had begun to reveal the themes that would become so important in the rest of the story. When the prisoner first comes into imprisonment, the books that he read are described as “principally of a light character; novels with a complicated love plot, sensational and fantastic stories”(Chekhov 2). As time goes on, the books that he read become different, changing shape as his personality changes. The banker compares his final book choices to “a man swimming in the sea among the