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The lawyer goes from staking his freedom on his belief that any life at all is worth living to renouncing life itself as meaningless and trivial. Once the bet begins, the lawyer appears to immediately suffer from the lack of human companionship. He refuses to drink wine because he considers alcohol a social pleasure. He reads novels because the vivid characters can provide company and plays music to distract himself from loneliness. He then turns to despair, drinking and sleeping as if to numb the passage of time. After this stage of his captivity, he calls for books on language and the humanities, subjects that are about communicating with and understanding humanity as a whole. It seems that in the face of loneliness, he reads subjects that bring him closer to the people he cannot be in touch with. Finally, confronted with being completely cut off from humanity, he struggles to assign meaning to his loneliness by reading books on religion, philosophy, and medicine. These books about life’s deeper truths finally help him find solace and meaning in his captivity by convincing him that life itself and all the pleasures he’s denied himself by taking this bet are meaningless in comparison with the eternal truth of God. As a result, despite spending most of the fifteen years desperate for human contact, by the end the lawyer despises the rest of humanity.
There are two ways to read the lawyer’s final conclusion. We can read it as the moral of the story and a true epiphany. His isolation has given him the opportunity to think more about life and its meaning than most people who are caught up in the day-to-day troubles and pleasures of life. It further establishes him as a foil to the banker, who is nearly willing to murder over the prospect of losing money and social status. The lawyer, not even knowing the danger, willingly gives up the two million rubles because he now judges earthly things to have no value at all. However, it’s also possible to read the lawyer as coming to this conclusion as a way to assign meaning to his loneliness. Just as the reality of life in captivity was more difficult than he imagined, so is life among people different in the books he says he lived vicariously through before calling them meaningless. By spending so much time alone, he has lost contact with the good in people, leaving him only with authors’ impressions to judge.
