During the final two years of the lawyer’s 15-year imprisonment in the garden wing of the banker’s house, he asks for a variety of different reading material. The narrator captures the unsettling nature of his requests using a simile:
Notes used to come from [the lawyer] in which he asked to be sent at the same time a book on chemistry, a text-book of medicine, a novel, and some treatise on philosophy or theology. He read as though he were swimming in the sea among the broken pieces of wreckage, and in his desire to save his life was eagerly grasping one piece after another.
The simile comparing the lawyer's reading habits to "swimming in the sea among the broken pieces of wreckage" effectively communicates the lawyer’s desperation and deterioration after being confined for so long. While he started his imprisonment believing that life was worth living no matter the circumstances, after 13 years of imprisonment, he is clearly starting to lose his sanity. His random choice of books—ranging from chemistry to medicine to philosophy to theology—shows that he is perhaps at his wit’s end. He is “eagerly grasping” for anything in a seemingly desperate attempt to survive his imprisonment.
In his final letter to the banker, the lawyer moves from listing all of the ways that literature helped him survive his imprisonment to condemning it, using three similes in the process:
“And I despise your books, despise all wordly blessings and wisdom. Everything is void, frail, visionary and delusive like a mirage. Though you be proud and wise and beautiful, yet will death wipe you from the face of the earth like the mice underground; and your posterity, your history, and the immortality of your men of genius will be as frozen slag, burnt down together with the terrestrial globe.”
The first simile here—in which the lawyer describes how books helped him realize that “[e]verything is void, frail, visionary and delusive like a mirage”—is evocative. The lawyer is ending his imprisonment deeply cynical about life, viewing it as being “like a mirage” rather than seeing life itself as a meaningful reality. As he goes on to describe later in the letter, it’s only heaven that offers an escape from this “void” and “delusive” reality.
The second simile the lawyer uses—“death [will] wipe you from the face of the earth like the mice underground”—furthers his dark and cynical view of humankind, comparing people to mice who are fated to live below ground.
In the third simile—"your posterity, your history, and the immortality of your men of genius will be as frozen slag”—the lawyer condemns humanity to existing as “frozen slag,” a type of waste that separates from metals during the smelting process. This is his way of saying that humankind’s “posterity,” “history,” and “men of genius” are not actually all that impressive.
All of this negative, nihilistic language combines to make it clear to the banker (and readers) that, after fifteen years of solitude, the lawyer has lost all sense of the meaning of life. In his view, there is no meaning. This is why he leaves his confinement five minutes before he would have won the bet and runs away into the night, leaving society behind.
Leading up to the lawyer’s release date, the banker starts to become very anxious as, over the course of the lawyer’s 15 years of imprisonment, the banker has lost most of his fortune. As the banker worries out loud to himself about the financial effects of losing the bet, he uses a simile:
“Why didn’t the man die? He’s only forty years old. He will take away my last farthing, marry, enjoy life, gamble on the Exchange, and I will look on like an envious beggar and hear the same words from him every day: ‘I’m obliged to you for the happiness of my life. Let me help you.’ No, it’s too much! The only escape from bankruptcy and disgrace—is that the man should die.”
The simile here—“I will look on like an envious beggar”—captures the banker’s deep fear of a future in which he does not have access to endless wealth. It seems unlikely that the banker would go so far as to become a beggar—it’s clear from the story that he has many assets to his name as well as an income-earning job at a bank—yet this exaggeration reveals something important about his character. To the banker, wealth is what allows him to have a meaningful life. So much so that he considers killing his friend over it.
This is, of course, the opposite of how the lawyer feels at the end of the story—to him, wealth is so meaningless that he leaves his confinement five minutes early, forfeiting the two million rubles he earned fair and square. With this juxtaposition, Chekhov encourages readers to reflect on their own relationship to greed and how far they are willing to go for wealth.
