I am a ridiculous person. Now they call me a madman.
Although broken up into sections called “Chapters” this is essentially a short story and even more precisely, it is really an extended interior monologue. The opening lines here situate the story in such a way that it may immediately recall for some Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Both narrators initiate their story by admitting that others may think them mad. And that’s where things diverge. This is not the story of a murderer who may be made or may simply be vying for leniency by pretending to be insane. They call him madman, after all. He calls himself ridiculous. And therein lie all the difference.
Dreams, as we all know, are very queer things: some parts are presented with appalling vividness, with details worked up with the elaborate finish of jewellery, while others one gallops through, as it were, without noticing them at all, as, for instance, through space and time. Dreams seem to be spurred on not by reason but by desire, not by the head but by the heart, and yet what complicated tricks my reason has played sometimes in dreams, what utterly incomprehensible things happen to it!
It is all too easy to focus almost exclusively on the ridiculous part of the title. After all, the work is a philosophical statement of a sort that admits to its ideological foundation being thought a thing of ridicule. But the title is quite clear and unambiguous: this is a story about not just a ridiculous man, but his dream. This passage highlights the fundamental psychological construction of the narrator: he may be viewed as a madman and a ridiculous man, but at least he is self-aware. In fact, he is intensely self-aware. This self-consciousness even forces him to question the nature of the act of dreaming itself rather than just accepting things a de facto given that dreams are one thing or another.
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. And yet it's an old truth which has been told and retold a billion times-- but it has not formed part of our lives!
Everything moves inexorably toward the climactic revelation which is expressed here. It is not anything new; there is no sudden flash of insight or philosophical illumination. The words that the ridiculous man preaches are worth living by are as old as literature itself. Loving others as you would love yourself is much better known as the Golden Rule. But the Golden Rule comes with strings attached: belief in the promise that exercising this philosophy will grant everlasting life in the kingdom of heaven. This is not so much the case with the ridiculous man. In fact, just before he asserts the foundation of his ministry here, he makes a caveat: “Suppose that this paradise will never come to pass (that I understand), yet I shall go on preaching it.” In other words, he is suggesting that abiding by the Golden Rule even in the face of the likelihood that it grants no payoff in the end is ridiculous, but absolutely essential.
