The lawyer suffered severely from loneliness and depression. The sounds of his piano could be heard continually day and night from his lodge. He refused wine and tobacco.
What is one way the lawyer has changed from the beginning of the story to the end? He has lost his wealth. He has learned how to do complex math equations.
What do you think this says about his life? The lawyer takes the bet so he won't be proven wrong. This says he is daring. At the beginning of the story they want the fortunes and by the end they don't.
At the end of Anton Chekhov's "The Bet", the lawyer survives the 15 years in prison but refuses to take the money.
25 years oldJust 25 years old when he attends the banker's party at the beginning of the story, the lawyer initially asserts that life-imprisonment is far preferable to capital punishment.
In the end of the story, "The Bet," the lawyer despairs of life, and he reneges on the wager with banker. In their bet about which is crueler, live-long imprisonment or capital punishment, the banker and the lawyer wager their futures. The young lawyer argues that life on any terms is better than death.
The lawyer states that the life sentence would be preferable, but the banker calls his bluff, saying that he couldn't stand five years in prison. The decision by the lawyer to raise the stakes is meant to prove his point that a life sentence would be preferable to a death sentence.
The banker felt that death penalty was better than life imprisonment. However, the lawyer said that if he had to choose, he would choose life imprisonment as he felt that it is better to live anyhow than to not live at all. This led to an argument, which transformed into a bet.
The lawyer told with the arrogance of youth that he can live for 15 years in solitary confinement. The lawyer was allowed to have anything in his confinement except The Human Companionship. He was given books and piano. He was allowed to write letters.
How does the lawyer behaviour change from year to year during imprisonment ? Solution : The lawyer in the story does indeed change over the course of his 15 years in "prison." When readers are first introduced to him, he is full of confidence in his own abilities and in his thoughts about capital punishment.
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. Capital punishment kills a man at once, but lifelong imprisonment kills him slowly.
In Chekhov's "The Bet," the banker and the lawyer both learn the futility of their wager, as they have found that life and its conditions differ greatly from their more youthful perceptions. The lawyer learns that his sweeping statement that life on any terms is better than death is not true.