Imprisonment and Freedom Theme Analysis

“The Bet” creates a situation in which a young lawyer, as part of a bet, is voluntarily imprisoned in solitary confinement for fifteen years. The bet itself is spurred by a debate about the nature of imprisonment: the lawyer believes that life is still worth living even when one is completely isolated, while the bet’s other party, the banker, holds that imprisonment, and the resultant loss of contact with the world, robs life of any value or meaning. The lawyer’s survival of the subsequent fifteen years initially seems to suggest that he is right—that a life of strictly regulated isolation is better than no life at all. Meanwhile, the banker flounders despite his freedom, losing both his fortune and moral compass during the fifteen years he engages with a world that the lawyer is denied. This, combined with the lawyer’s ultimate renunciation of all worldly society even after his imprisonment ends, raises the question as to whether anyone is ever actually free—or simply trapped in a prison of society’s making.

Throughout his solitary confinement the lawyer plays music, reads books on subjects across all realms of human knowledge, drinks wine, smokes cigarettes, and so on. The lawyer not only endures his imprisonment, but at times he even seems to thrive—much to the banker’s dismay, it becomes clear that the lawyer will win the bet. Imprisonment, the story seems to suggest, can’t snuff out a purposeful life, and perhaps that a life that lacks purpose, such as the banker’s, is the actual prison.

The final twist of the story changes this understanding completely, however. After the banker decides he must win the bet and sneaks into the prison-house to kill the lawyer, he finds the lawyer’s final letter. In the letter, the lawyer renounces the terms of the bet and gives up his winnings, on the grounds that he has come to realize during his imprisonment that everything he valued, and everything most people value—from money, to art, to wisdom, to love—is meaningless in the face of death, and that only heaven holds any worth.

Put another way, while earlier in the story it seemed possible to see the banker’s immoral life as a prison and the lawyer’s imprisoned life as free, what the lawyer here argues is that all life is a prison: that anything worldly that people pursue, whether immoral or noble, is a prison that blinds them to the truth of what matters (that is, heaven). The banker responds by feeling personal shame and sparing the lawyer’s life, but also by locking the lawyer’s letter away. This suggests that this prison, which holds all of humanity, is voluntary—any person could read the lawyer’s message and reject the prison of life, but instead nearly every person instead chooses to live an imprisoned life.