…voluntary confinement is a great deal harder to bear than compulsory. However The Bet smartly gets around this by qualifying who gets locked up and the circumstances thereof: While the plot explores the long-term effects of incarceration, The Bet also probes into how people treat each other and see themselves.Ī wager is proposed: How much isolation could a man take? Could a young man of modest means withstand 15 years of solitary confinement? If he could, a banker of ample means would award him $2 million.įor someone who’s never spent a day locked up, Chekhov’s bet may seem like something worth trying. Which executioner is the more humane, he who kills you in a few minutes or he who drags the life out of you in the course of many years? The Bet, (1889) by Anton Chekhov, uses a philosophical argument about exploitation, greed, overconfidence, fear, and failure in a debate about whether a modern society should use the death penalty or life imprisonment as a punishment.Ĭapital punishment kills a man at once, but lifelong imprisonment kills him slowly.
0 kommentar(er)
