The story opens with a self-description of the first-person narrator, a man who labels himself "a ridiculous man." He believes that he recognizes, both in himself and in reality, that there is nothing that truly exists, or at least has any kind of coherent meaning. This revelation has rendered him hopeless, preoccupied, and yet never occupied with anything at all. He has decided that he wants to shoot himself, but he can never really bring himself to do it - it never seems like the right time.
One day, he decides that night will be the night he shoots himself. On the way home, however, he has an encounter that leaves him perturbed and questioning his newfound resolution: he runs into a young girl who can't find her mother and who asks him for help. Irritated, he brushes her off, and when she doesn't leave immediately he begins shouting and stamping at her until she runs off, crying. That event wasn't worrying in itself, but the narrator starts to feel guilty about his actions, which concerns him: if there's no meaning, no one matters, so why should he feel guilty about being selfish?
As he sits in his chair, about to shoot himself, he continues to muse on this incident until he falls asleep. While asleep, he dreams of his suicide: having shot himself in the heart, he is placed in a coffin and buried. Eventually he is taken from this grave by an ethereal being, who transports him to a universe that looks quite like our own, even taking him to a replica of Earth, but one that is unmarred by sin and selfishness. On this perfect Earth, the people are characterized by a radical and overflowing love that revolutionizes the narrator's understanding of human nature. He very quickly realizes that this is how life is supposed to be, and he comes to love this society in turn.
However, the very presence of the narrator's imperfect selfishness gradually corrupts this perfect world. People begin to lie, cheat, and steal, and the love that characterized all actions dwindles away until the world is no better than our own. In fact, it looks very much like our own; men use the pursuit of knowledge to justify selfishness and abasement, and they speak the following paragraph to explain themselves:
"We may be deceitful, wicked and unjust, we know it and weep over it, we grieve over it; we torment and punish ourselves more perhaps than that merciful Judge Who will judge us and whose Name we know not. But we have science, and by the means of it we shall find the truth and we shall arrive at it consciously. Knowledge is higher than feeling, the consciousness of life is higher than life. Science will give us wisdom, wisdom will reveal the laws, and the knowledge of the laws of happiness is higher than happiness" (18).
The narrator awakens to find himself in his chair, loaded gun nearby, and the change that has been effected in his character is striking. He no longer considers suicide but is immediately and immensely grateful for life, a sentiment that bleeds over into every corner of himself. Now he recounts that others still find him ridiculous with his radical teachings of love, but he is so blissful in his certainty that this ridicule doesn't bother him. At the end of the story, the narrator tracks down the little girl who started this chain of events, ending on a rapturous note of joy.
