RELLING: Oh, life would be quite tolerable, after all, if only we could be rid of the confounded duns that keep on pestering us, in our poverty, with the claim of the ideal.
GREGERS: [looking straight before him] In that case, I am glad that my destiny is what is.
RELLING: May I inquire,—what is your destiny?
GREGERS: [going] To be the thirteenth at table.
RELLING: The devil it is.

This dialogue between Relling and Gregers closes the play. Hedvig has died to no redemptive end. The sardonic Dr. Relling thus delivers a sort of epitaph on the romantic, Salvationist hero cut here by Gregers. Life would be "quite tolerable" if missionaries left men in their poverty rather than preaching the delusions of the ideal. Thus Gregers makes a melancholic exit from a world in which he in a sense has come to have no place. His destiny is to be the "thirteenth at the table," that is, the guest outside the circle of diners. His number recalls the figure of Judas at the Last Supper, and Relling also identifies him as the devil or Antichrist. Gregers's insistence on the ideal condemns him to a false gospel that drives him to the betrayal of his friends and brings ruin to their houses.