Essay Questions

How long has the narrator realized that he is a ridiculous man?

The introductory paragraph announces that the narrator is thought by others to be mad and that the view of his being ridiculous is his own. By the second paragraph he is confessing that being ridiculous to himself used cause him pain and misery, foreshadowing the transformation to come in which he accepts it and even embraces. He surmises that he may well have been born a ridiculous person, but then goes on to become more precise, suggesting that his self-awareness came on quite early in life, probably by the time he was just seven-years-old.

What is the point of the digression about the narrator’s fellow lodger known only as the captain?

What do we know about the fellow lodger? He is a retired lodger who drinks too much and gambles too much and gets into arguments and begs for money. He also terrifies the landlady and her children into submission. The low-lifes that he invites to his card games are routinely subject to getting into loud arguments and disruptive altercations. In short, the captain is an intensely unpleasant person to have to share lodgings with. Despite this, however, the narrator flat out asserts the man’s “behavior has caused me no annoyance.” The digressive portrait of this character who play no further role in the story is there for the purpose of delineating the narrator’s state of mind before his transformative dream. He was essentially a depressive nihilist without even the most basic fundamental self-preserving narcissistic lack of empathy. So removed from the social context of life was the narrator that he even lacked empathy for his own conditions.

Following the revelations in his dream, the narrator embarks upon a mission bring paradise to earth. What is the one ironically understated obstruction he faces?

The path to paradise is quite simple: convince people to treat everyone else as they would treat themselves. A slight alteration of the Golden Rule. If everyone would merely follow this simple dictum, paradise could be gained because by its very definition it would eliminate many of the hazards of social civilization: envy, political factionalism, inequitable distribution of wealth, nationalist pride, and punitive justice among things. Taking into consideration that what is being asked requires seemingly little effort and is philosophically as pure as it gets, the idea of ministering this roadway to paradise does not, on the surface, seem quite so ridiculous. Until, of course, the next-to-last sentence in the story where the full ironic dimension of this quest becomes undeniably clear: “If only every wants it, it can be arranged at once.”