Like much of the writing of Dostoyevsky, “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man” is actually a philosophical treatise masquerading as a work of fiction. Structurally, it is an extended interior monologue. Characters do not engage in actual conversation the way is usually thought and much of the conversation that does take place occurs in what the title assures us is a dream, even if the narrator himself is not entirely sure.
The philosophical issue at hand is fairly simple: why try to be a good person with a moral code if there is no guarantee of a reward for this behavior in the form of an eternal afterlife? The narrator—the ridiculous man—has reached a state where this preys upon his mind to the point that in the moment he turns his back on a needy young child, leaving her to fend for herself wet tatters and anxiety. Only later, once home, does regret begin to not just seep in, but overcome him to the point of driving him to thoughts of suicide. Such cruelty and for what? Nothing was gained from it and while there is no certainty that anything would have been gained by showing compassion and empathy, there would have been positive consequences in the form of, at the very least, reducing the level of anxiety in the young girl. Although not directly addressed, the implicit potential lingers over the episode: but what if there was a guarantee that by doing the right thing, the moral thing, the compassionate thing the ridiculous man would have deposited a few more credits toward paying for the privilege of a place in heaven?
The answer is that the episode would have turned out differently. When faced with the prospect of treating others either the way we would want them to treat us or the way we would treat ourselves, can be there be any doubt that a proper stimulus would be credits toward the afterlife? The answer to that question is, of course, the entire basis for religious faith. The faithful does not know for certain that doing good in this life is rewarded in the next, but instead merely believes it to be so. And if there actually turns out not to be any credit for doing good, then that probably means there is no debit for doing good either. Under those circumstances, doing good doesn’t get you anything, but it also doesn’t cost you anything so logic dictates it is still better to do good for that feeling it endows of having done something good.
Essentially, this is the argument the ridiculous man makes and the new gospel he plans to preach as a result of the conversion created by his dream experience. The foundation of that gospel is simply laid out by him toward the end: “The chief thing is to love others like yourself, that's the chief thing, and that's everything; nothing else is wanted--you will find out at once how to arrange it all.” He asserts that so powerful and logical is this philosophy as an existential ideology that he doesn’t even need to have faith in the ultimate payoff of a paradise, promising that even if “this paradise will never come to pass” in a way that he will understand it is the reward for a life well-served, “yet shall I go on preaching it.”
In other words, what makes the narrator ridiculous and even possibly in the eyes of some a madman is not his suggestion that humanity does not require a guarantee of being rewarded in an afterlife for doing good in this life. It doesn’t even need to put faith into the belief that such a system is in place. It is ridiculous on the face of it: why bother doing good when it literally does not matter one way or the other to your everlasting soul? If one is convinced death is the end and there is absolutely no such thing as an eternal existence in its wake, what is to be gained doing anything other than living a life of complete self-centered self-interest?
It is a ridiculous assumption the narrator makes, but he is willing to invest in it with everything he’s got. The rapture driving the narrator is the existential raising of consciousness that doing the right thing in and of itself brings about a sense of contented happiness that is beyond the happiness of acquisition and fulfillment of self-interest. Like Camus observed of the endless effort by Sisyphus to push that rock to the top of the hill, the ridiculous man learns that “the struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart.”
