An Analysis That Reveals Russian Frame Of Mind After Its Revolution

 The Bet 

1. Who are the protagonist and antagonist of this short story?

A/ The protagonists of the story are the lawyer and the banker while the antagonist of the story are the guests at the party. 

2.  Describe them according to next requirements regarding traits:

Main characters 

The banker	The lawyer
Positive: He was a persistent and resilient man, also very honest until he had to face his own discomfort.  Negative: His desire to kill the lawyer and pin the death on his servants, also his gambling problem that almost bankrupted him. Motivations: His motivation to kill the lawyer was the desire of keeping his wealth and comfort.	Positive: Was a man who had very clear morals and ends up becoming a person who values life beyond material things.  Negative: He develops hatred towards human relations and also wasted fifteen years of his life trying to prove a point that at the end didn’t even matter.  Motivations: He’s motivation was to prove the banker a point and also to win the money his opponent was offering him.

3. Who began the wager?

A/ The young banker.

4. Why and how did the lawyer’s reading habits change over the years?

A/ The lawyer's habits, especially his reading habits, shifted over time, demonstrating how loneliness, lack of freedom, and deprivation of human interaction affected his thoughts and feelings.

As a result of having to spend so much time alone, the prisoner's reading preferences changed, indicating that he was becoming much more serious-minded. He began to learn about languages, philosophy, and history. 

Chekhov's "The Bet" has a surprising ending that shows that the prisoner has learned that enlightenment is much more valuable than money.

5. How does the lawyer help depict the theme? 

A/ The main theme of the story is the meaning of life and in order to give a sense to his principal objective the author explores other themes related to the principal one, such as crime, freedom, punishment, greed, loneliness and imprisonment. As the story evolves we see how the young lawyer who at first believed it was easy to be captive for not 5 but 15 years because of his lack of commitment or his young age and only purpose which was getting the most money out of a simple bet shifts when he matures, and acquires all this knowledge from the books he was reading and realizes that he has lost the best years of his life and that money isn’t everything, and to prove how much he hates everything now, to prove his new point he leaves jail 5 minutes before the bet is over. 

6. Does the banker’s perspective ever change throughout the story?

A/ Yes, as the years passed, the banker's attitude toward the bet shifted, at first he felt confident and excited because he thought he could win the bet easily but when he started to see that the lawyer was achieving the goal he started to feel doubt, terror and panic.

7. What is the banker’s reason for thinking that the death penalty is better than life imprisonment?

A/ He supports the fact that it is more humane to kill someone instantly rather than keeping him captive his whole life, making him die slowly and suffering everything, losing his family, being in solitary, losing hope and even respect for himself. 

8. How does the banker’s financial status change through the years?

A/ He starts losing money because of his gambling problem, and if he had to pay his debt to the lawyer he would go bankrupt. Throughout the story we are able to see how his financial status changes for the worst. 

9. Why do you think Chekhov chose to leave his characters and the setting unnamed?

A/ We think the author left the characters and the setting unnamed, because he wanted every single reader to be able to relate with the characters, it didn’t matter who they were or where they were, it just mattered their opinions and what they were willing to do to prove them. 

10. What do you think Chekhov is saying about wealth, freedom and greed?

A/ We think he's trying to show how we sometimes are the ones keeping ourselves captive, because the lawyer was willingly a prisoner, he did it not only to prove a point but also for money, and in our lives we can have different motives but we are still doing it, and being a prisoner is not only about something physical, we can be emotional prisoners too. Also he shows how greed can take someone so far and they can end up doing inhuman things just because the ambition, and about wealth he shows how it isn’t the most important thing on earth and how we can live in peace and freedom without all of the material things. 

11. Irony throughout the story

Situational	Dramatic	Verbal
Throughout this story, situational irony plays a significant role. For instance, the lawyer immediately claims that life in jail is preferable to a death penalty for a prisoner, however after finishing his 15-year "incarceration" test, he starts to despise life and loneliness and has almost nothing to live for. If the lawyer had the chance to speak with the banker following his incarceration, he may have concluded that the death penalty was a much more humane punishment.	Since the story is told mainly in flashback, it relies on dramatic iron, which is a literary device by which the audience’s or reader’s understanding of events or individuals in a work surpasses that of its characters. As it opens , the banker remembers the talk he had with the young lawyer fifteen years ago when he made the wager with the lawyer. The banker is aware, and the reader gradually realizes, that he does not have sufficient funds to cover his bet if he loses. Chekhov, on the other hand, employs dramatic irony by revealing this detail to the audience but not to the lawyer.	The lawyer's physical description is a kind of verbal irony, in which the writer says one thing but means something completely different. When the banker sneaks into the lawyer's office at the end, he notices that he is much skinnier and dreadful than before. He described him as a half-dead man dreaming of his two-million-dollar to-be, who will be murdered in the next few minutes without showing any signs of violence. But it was as if he were defined physically; his heart and body were wary and half-dead; it was not what the banker felt (happy, thrilling, waiting to enjoy life and risk his money on the exchange...); instead, he was torn between all of the things he had come to understand as the world and his life in the previous 15 years.

Analysis of the story 

Theme

The theme of this story is the meaning of life and how we need to go through something to find it. Also in how sometimes we lost many years of our lives without a purpose. Themes that are also involved in this story are greed, freedom, punishment and wealth.  

Tone:The tone of this story is ambivalent . 

Voice: Omniscient, with a subjective voice.  

Mood: Frustration, stress, tension. 

Conflict 

Inner conflict: The lawyer against himself due to the fact that he wanted to complete the bet at first but later realized that he had lost a crucial part of his life, hadn’t built a family, had no work, or contact with any person during his captivity, hated everything and had to accept that his greed and stupidity were the cause of his misery.  And also the banker against himself because he can decide to honor his bet and be poor.  Or he can secretly murder the lawyer and stay semi-wealthy.  

 

Man vs. Man:  The lawyer who didn’t support the death penalty against the Banker who did. 

Man vs. Nature: The lawyer against the imprisonment that made him develop a certain hatred towards human connection or engagement. Because of the amount of time he spent in isolation. 

Man vs. society: The Banker against the guests at the party who didn’t support the death penalty. Taking into account that he was living in a time where the government taking people's life away was something immoral and went against their beliefs since they thought the state wasn’t God and it had no right to take away what it couldn’t restore. 

Man vs superpower: The fact that the lawyer was a prisoner willingly during 15 years just for the money, that’s a situation that wouldn’t happen in real life. 

 

Climax: When the banker's watchman arrived with the news that the man had escaped "out of the window" and vanished beyond the garden gate. The lawyer's decision to abandon the wager since he's so close to winning is shocking, it's a shame that the lawyer gave up fifteen years of his life. This climax may also have a moral, which is that a life lived for money, or in search of money, is a life wasted.

Resolution: The banker takes the letter in which the young man renounces the two million dollars and puts it in a safe. The banker has practically won the bet, but he'll be ready unless the man seems to have a change of mind about the money.

New Ending: The lawyer jumped back to the conversation, everything had been an illusion, he was thinking on every possible scenario that could happen, will the banker win, will he be able to stay in the cell, is it really worthy, that was a lot of money which he definitely wanted, but it was fifteen years of his life wasted. After much thought he decided instead to act mature and from his scope and take the advantages his job brought start researching on a way to improve the quality of life for people that had to endure life sentence. 

By Natalia Rojas A., Dina Reyes M.

and Isabella Duarte Cano,Step 11