The Bet

In his notes for “The Bet,” Chekhov referred to the story as a fairy tale. The characters have no proper names, which allows them to function as stock characters like the princes, goblins, and dragons of classic fairy tales. Furthermore, wagers, imprisonment, long passages of time, sleeping, and surprise endings are traditional devices in moral fables. The kiss the banker gives the lawyer near the end of the story mirrors the magical kisses that end many such fables.

Unlike fairy tales, however, “The Bet” has no clear moral. It is too character-centered and contains too much ambiguity to be seen merely as a parable designed to teach a lesson. The narrator doesn’t cast judgment on the wager, and the story has no obvious hero or villain. The argument about the death penalty becomes secondary to the psychological punishment the two men put themselves through. Rather than being under the spell of a cruel monster or stepmother, the two men are their own jailors. And the sorrows they face are of their own making—with no clear benefit to either of them.

The omniscient third-person narrator establishes the gloomy and suspenseful