Recently, I read the short story “The Bet,” by Anton Chekhov. I found it a very interesting story about a bet between a lawyer and a banker who are arguing about life imprisonment and the death sentence. The lawyer, who would prefer life imprisonment to the death sentence, because at least the imprisoned does not die, agrees to spend fifteen years trapped in a small cabin located in the banker’s garden. The banker, a reckless young millionaire, agrees to pay him two million dollars if he can do so successfully, since he believes that life imprisonment is merely a slow form of death. When the lawyer comes out greatly changed, the author shows that life imprisonment is, truly, worse than death — the lawyer no longer cares for the two million dollars he staked fifteen years of his life on, and a large majority of his opinions about the world were completely changed during his fifteen years of study. I found the storyline, as well as the message behind the story, engaging because of the large stakes in the story. I would rate it 9.8/10 and recommend it to anyone interested in the debate between the death sentence and life imprisonment or simply looking for an interesting book to read.
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