The tone of “The Bet” is, for the most part, formal and unemotional. While in some fiction the narrator feels like a character in their own right, here the narrator mostly remains objective and uninvolved, reporting on what is happening to the two main characters rather than offering any opinions or analysis of their own.
There are times when the lack of an emotional tone verges on the comical. For example, the narrator breezes past five years of the lawyer’s confinement in just a few journalistic sentences:
During the first year the lawyer was sent books of a light character; novels with a complicated love interest, stories of crime and fantasy, comedies, and so on.
In the second year the piano was heard no longer and the lawyer asked only for classics. In the fifth year, music was heard again, and the prisoner asked for wine.
Here, the narrator’s tone is so emotionally removed that readers are left scratching their heads, wondering how this could be all that there is to report on five years of a person's solitary confinement. This tone is intentional on Chekhov’s part. By keeping the narrator’s opinions and feelings at bay, readers have to decide for themselves how they relate to this story, coming to their own conclusions on questions about freedom, imprisonment, and the true meaning of life.
