What you need to know:
The ridiculous man has decided that nothing else matters to him. He sees no reason to continue living. He plans his death and buys a revolver, intending to shoot himself in the forehead. Yet the gun remains in his small apartment for two months while he waits for the right time to end his life.
Some people are lucky that life keeps giving them chances. Time and again. However, because life does what life does, others are not so lucky—life doesn't care enough to give them a chance to choose it. In The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, a short story by Fyodor Dostoevsky, the ridiculous man is so lucky that when he wants to end his life, it sends someone to keep him awake at night to reflect on his actions.
The story begins with him declaring himself ridiculous. Then, he reflects on how people laugh at him. He feels sad that they don’t know the truth. He admits that he knew he was a ridiculous man from the moment he was born and that, as he gained knowledge, he realised more and more just how ridiculous he was.
“Everyone laughed at me. But not one of them knew or guessed that if there were one man on earth who knew better than anybody else that I was absurd, and what I resented most of all was that they did not know that,” he writes.
