Skip to main content

The Charm of Falsehood

 


The Dream of a Ridiculous Man is a short story by Dostoevsky. The narrator-protagonist is a total misfit in the human world. “Oh, how hard it is to be the only one who knows the truth!” He reflects. The truth he knows makes him a ridiculous man first and later a mad man.

He knows that human life is absurd. That is the truth he knows. He is incapable of loving that life. He cannot accept the normal human jealousies, greed, mendacity, and so on. He is utterly frustrated and wants to kill himself. He buys a revolver and wants to fire the bullet right into his brain.

One day, while walking towards home in the night contemplating suicide, a little girl of eight tugs at his elbow frantically. The girl’s mother is in some danger and wants urgent help. The girl looks absolutely miserable wearing tattered clothes and torn shoes. The protagonist does not feel any sympathy for the girl. He pushes the girl away and walks off.

At home, the girl rises in his consciousness. He wonders why he did not feel pity for that helpless little creature. Why was he not even able to feel shame at his behaviour? Thinking about the wretchedness of human life, he falls asleep. He has a dream.

In the dream he picks up his revolver and shoots at his heart. Heart, not the brain as he had planned originally, he reassures us. When the coffin shakes on the shoulders of its carriers to the grave, our protagonist who is lying in that coffin realises without any doubt that he is dead. He is buried now.

Lying in his grave, he challenges the supernatural power, if there is any, saying that he would not surrender to its tyranny. After a while, he is carried to the space by a mysterious creature to a world that looks similar to the earth and yet is entirely different.

There are men and women in that world. But they are innocent. They are like children in their gaiety and playfulness. They sing songs and eat fruits and honey. There is no jealousy or quarrel of any sort among them. On the contrary, they appreciate one another for what they do. There is hardly any illness among them. Death is a peaceful affair like sleep. They have no temples or idols. Yet they have a sense of spirituality, a sense of oneness with the whole universe. Theirs is a utopia, the protagonist realises. Is it heaven?

The protagonist teaches those people to lie. To utter falsehood. Just for fun. It doesn't ever occur to him that the “fun” he introduces in that utopia will turn it into a dystopia so quickly. The heaven becomes a hell sooner than anyone could imagine. The people enjoy telling lies. They love “the charm of falsehood”. They deceive each other. They begin to view things as “mine and thine”. They divide themselves into us and them. Temples and idols come up soon for the different factions among them. A few become the custodians of knowledge and knowledge gains precedence over tender emotions. Slavery becomes a virtue. Those who talk of love and harmony are ridiculed and even tortured. Soon enough, wars start in the erstwhile utopia. All because of the frivolous falsehood that our protagonist introduced for fun.

The protagonist tries his best to make them understand that their earlier world was far, far superior. But they refuse to listen to him. He asks them to crucify him for his sin of corrupting them. They think he is mad. They conspire to throw him in a madhouse.

The protagonist wakes up from his dream. He is now a transformed person. He has seen both heaven and hell. He has seen how a heaven can be converted into a hell easily. Falsehood is a catastrophe. Falsehood enchants too. The protagonist wants to teach his new knowledge to people. He starts preaching. He preaches that we can be “beautiful and happy” easily.  

People don’t believe him, however. They scoff him for being a dreamer. They think he is under a hallucination.

The story ends with our protagonist finding out that little girl who had approached him that other night for help.

He won’t need his revolver anymore. Better still, he will live a happy life because he has learnt the secret of genuine happiness. He has seen the border between truth and falsehood. He has learnt that the charms of falsehood are delusions.

PS. You can download Dostoevsky’s story here: The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

PPS. Praful Khoda Patel’s Lakshadweep reminded me of this story.

Comments

  1. Very nice. Enjoyed reading this one with a great message.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hari OM
    I am a fan of Dostoevsky - as you say, never disappoints!

    The subject certainly touches upon the subjects I have chose to write about today and tomorrow on Aatmaavrajanam, for I sense there is a rising tide of concern about how the world is now - yet we lack a blanket 'dream' to return our full humanity! YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. We need to relearn to dream, dream big...

      I'll definitely go through your posts related to the theme.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Trump in Indian Media

Aroon Purie, editor of India Today , thinks that Trump owes his victory to such issues as price rise, housing crisis, influx of immigrants, and the conservative rebellion against elite wokeism. Trump presidency portends populism, nativism, isolationism, and protectionism, says Purie quoting Condoleeza Rice. The world may not be a happier place with Trump leading America. “What is the world according to Trump?” India Today ’s senior journalist Raj Chengappa asks. His answer: “… it is ensuring America’s interests first with those of every other nation coming a very distant second.” Trump thinks that hitherto the other nations were eating America’s lunch. The allusion is not only to the immigrants but also to America “paying everyone else’s bills to maintain the global order.” Though Trump would like to play a key role in bringing the two wars [Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Gaza] to an end, he will not do anything that will involve a price tag that the US has to pay for. Chengappa worri

Childhood

They say that childhood is the best phase of one’s life. I sigh. And then I laugh. I wish I could laugh raucously. But my voice was snuffed out long ago. By the conservatism of the family. By the ignorance of the religious people who controlled the family. By educators who were puppets of the system fabricated by religion mostly and ignorant but self-important politicians for the rest. I laugh even if you can’t hear the sound of my laughter. You can’t hear the raucousness of my laughter because I have been civilised by the same system that smothered my childhood with soft tales about heaven and hell, about gods and devils, about the non sequiturs of life which were projected as great. I lost my childhood in the 1960s. My childhood belonged to a period of profound social, cultural and political change. All over the world. But global changes took time to reach my village in Kerala, India. India was going through severe crises when I was struggling to grow up in a country where

Donald Trump and One-dimensional Life

Herbert Marcuse introduced the concept of one-dimensional existence, back in 1964. A one-dimensional person is a product of consumerism, technology, and conformist ideologies. One-dimensional people are happy with material comforts and superficial freedoms. They are rendered incapable of critical thinking, creativity, and authentic individuality. Hence they fail to see the system’s fault lines and injustices. In fact, the creators of the system make the society appear so efficient and materially fulfilling that all opposition succumbs to a natural death. The system creates the people’s needs through the media, propaganda of all sorts, advertisements and a mass culture. Probably, Marcuse’s concept is more relevant today than in 1960s. How else would we explain the victories of our present-day leaders, the latest being Donald Trump’s. Why would a nation like the United States of America elect a man like Donald Trump as its president? As Ali Chougule writes in today’s Free Press Jou