“Naturally, I immediately began finding out everything I could about her indirectly, and awaited her arrival with a special sense of anticipation.”

The narrator felt drawn to the girl and set about finding out as much as he could through gossip and bribery. This approach seemed natural to him, suggesting the extent to which he favors indirect contact over interaction, even in the case of the woman he hoped would be his wife. The casual tone with which the narrator describes the atypical courtship hints at his failure to comprehend how different he really is.

“Even now I don’t understand, even now it’s all a mystery to me.”

The narrator veers between self-justification and gnawing self-blame. Amid the surety of his earlier comments, his rapid, emotional narration occasionally veers into confession. He admits that everything is a mystery to him, even though he is the person through whom the audience is meant to understand the situation. The narrator fails to recognize his own subjectivity or the way it shapes the story.

“Well, there were no quarrels actually, but there was silence and, more and more often, a bold look on her part.”

The narrator corrects the earlier characterization of his marriage, noting the ominous silences that he felt between himself and his wife. The silences are telling, speaking to the lack of communication between them. Rather than acting, however, the passive narrator only observed the silence and felt unable to do anything about it.

“Only 16, the first flush of youth, what could she possibly have understood of my self-justifications, my sufferings?”

The narrator’s new wife was a girl who just turned 16; he is a man of 41, whose past shames weigh heavily on him and which he kept hidden from her. He notes her naivety and youth, asking how she could possibly have understood the complexity of his emotions, yet he burdened her with them all the same. This illustrates the extent to which he didn’t recognize her full humanity and viewed her only as a means of healing himself.

“I did not refuse the duel from motives of cowardice, but because I did not wish to submit myself to their despotic verdict and call a man out to a duel when I did not consider myself insulted.”

The narrator tries to assert control over his past by insisting that his refusal of the duel was not due to cowardice. While he may be convinced of this, few others believe it. In the story’s present, the shame of being labeled a “coward” motivates many of his actions and the careful way in which he insists on asserting control over the story. It contrasts with his more emotional, frantic narration elsewhere and speaks to the extent to which his past continues to concern him.

“This was the first time she had not slept by my side—note that also.”

The narrator tells his audience to note how aspects of the story reveal the extent to which he is aware of his own narration. His narration has a purpose, as he is trying to convince the imagined audience (and himself) of something. He is presenting a version of events and asides that reveal his subjectivity, alluding to the intention behind his words.

“Even without words, the bed made her realize that I had ‘seen everything and knew everything’ and that there could no longer be any doubt.”

The narrator speaks on behalf of his now-deceased wife, even though he is constantly unable to empathize with her or understand her perspective throughout the rest of the story. The surety with which he says that there “could no longer be any doubt” undermines the objectivity of his narration. He is narrating from a biased and unreliable perspective, which is reinforced by comments such as this.

“I wanted to pray for an hour, but I couldn’t keep from thinking and thinking, sick thoughts and a sick head—what’s the use of praying now?”

The narrator is rarely specific about his religious beliefs, but his attitude toward prayer suggests an incompatibility with religion that frustrates him. He finds no use in praying, even in one of the most emotionally taxing moments of his life, as he is distracted by his own “sick thoughts.” The narrator’s restless interiority is more significant that any religion that he may hold.

“Three years of grim memories followed, even the Vyazemsky House.”

The Vyazemsky House was a home for the destitute; that the narrator felt the need to lodge in such a place speaks to the economic precarity of his situation, particularly for a former military officer and member of the Russian nobility. The grimness of these three years in the narrator’s life illustrates his social alienation, revealing the extent of his marginalization and how it continues to affect his return to society. Even if he remains somewhat marginalized, he does not want to return to Vyazemsky House.

“Oh, now I understand: she felt embarrassed that I was still her husband, concerned about her, as if I were a genuine husband.”

The narrator’s choice of words is particularly telling as he tries to comprehend his wife’s interiority. From the moment they met, she was inscrutable to him, but he didn’t care. Now, however, he insists that he understands her. The bemused way in which he uses the phrase “as if I were a genuine husband” reveals how he sees the marriage. He also does not see his wife (or anyone other than himself) as a genuine person. All others are as inscrutable to him.

“She seemed to give a start, and began prattling again that I was exaggerating, but all at once, her face darkened as she buried it in her hands and began to sob…”

The sincere emotions of the girl presented the narrator with a problem. Since he could not empathize with or understand her, he dismissed her, unable to comprehend her despair. She started to cry, at which point his narration fades out. The use of the ellipsis illustrates the extent to which sincere emotion in others brings a halt to the narrator’s understanding.

“Oh, I’m not letting Lukeriya go for anything now, she knows it all, she was here the whole winter, she’ll tell me all about it.”

Lukeriya announces that, following the death of the narrator’s wife, she does not plan to stay in his employ. This assertion of agency and rights is alien to the privileged narrator. He unilaterally decides that she must remain in his employ until he has learned everything he can from her, at which point she will be allowed to leave. The idea that Lukeriya may not want to stay in the job is so irrelevant to the narrator that he casually ignores it. This reflects class relations in Russia in this period.

“Did she respect me? I don’t know if she despised me or not.”

The narrator admits that his only real questions about his wife’s death involve the ways that it reflects back on him. He only cares about whether she respected him since the way he’s seen is much more important to him than the way she felt. The nonchalant way in which he foregrounds his own feelings—even with her dead body beside him—speaks to the depth of his alienation from everyone else around him.