Sun (symbol)
In the very end the narrator cries out his soul for his greatest loss in life, and everything seems dead for him; he does not know what he will do tomorrow when his wife would be buried and he would stay alone. As he says, “The sun is rising and — look at it, is it not dead?” For him everything is dead, and the image of a dead sun is underscored by the associations from the Apocalypse, and the sun – a source of life - turns into a symbol of death.
Public (motif)
The story told by Dostoevsky is a tragic one as it end with the death of a young woman who had all her life in front of her and would live it through if it was not for sober reality with its prejudices and opinions. The motif of public is represented by the fact that the main characters have no names – the author does not gives them names with the most obvious goal – he does not want it to become personal, he wants to emphasize that it is public and may concern every one in society.
To give a lesson one should die (allegory)
The death of the Gentle "animates" the narrator: in place of the silence, legalized by him in conjugal communication comes his "living" suffering word. In the fusion of the hero's feelings and thoughts, his "planning" of the relationship with the Gentle in the past, and the desire to defend the rightness of his "system" now, and the incontrovertible dream of a happy solution to a collision with Nature and fate, and the final recognition of its insolubility, and awareness the unfoundedness of their claims to a special situation among people, and the painful, persistent thoughts of guilt before his wife. This "crucible of doubt" of the narrator determines the structure of the narrative in "A Gentle Creature." One stars estimate something only when he loses it.
