Resumo de The Sixth Ward

If a noble man is not smart enough, he may end up in a lunatic asylum. This is not to say that this is the moral of the long short story ?The Sixth Ward? written by no less a person than Anton Chekhov, the master story teller. This is the feeling one may get after reading the last sentence of the story. But it is a story that discusses everything of a society very much similar to our present society without making the reader bored for a moment. When the mental health of a society as a whole has gone awry, there is little hope for sane people.

The story revolves round a government hospital, neglected and dirty with a corrupt medical and non-medical staff, attending to the medical needs of the poor nevertheless. One honest doctor takes charge of the hospital and he is the only man free from corruption in the hospital. The sixth ward of the hospital is situated away from the main building and it is meant for mental patients. There are some permanent inpatients in the ward and it is never visited by any doctor. The new Chief Doctor starts giving visits to the sixth ward, where he meets a highly educated patient.

The patient is suffering from persecution complex. He feels that spies are watching him and the police may come any moment to catch him and implicate him in a murder case or some such thing. The Chief Doctor finds the patient a great scholar and except at rare moments when he starts suspecting that he is being watched, he speaks very lucidly. He hails from an impoverished noble family and had to discontinue his university education and take up some clerical job when his father died and his family lost all its properties suddenly. The young man was supporting his mother from his income. The ways of a heartless society takes its toll in the case of this young man, particularly when he is lonely without friends. Some murder takes place in the neighbourhood. The young man starts suspecting that the police may suspect him and he may have to leave his old and helpless mother to die alone if he is arrested. This gradually sinks into his mind. One day the landlady finds that the young man is not coming out of his room for two days. Ultimately it is found that for two days he was hiding inside a wooden box without food.

The Chief Doctor, who is a bachelor, starts spending more and more hours with his patient discussing different questions of life and philosophy. The Chief Doctor believes in stoicism which glorifies suffering. He recalls the teachings of a Greek philosopher who said that a truly philosophical man can live in a wooden barrel happily and suffering is purely a mental state. For this our scholar patient replies that the philosopher would have simply died of cold if he tried his philosophy in Siberia and as for pain he asks the Chief Doctor to put the fingers of his hands in between the hinges of a door and try close the door and see whether pain is felt.

In the meantime the Assistant Chief Doctor is not very happy with his Chief because he is not able to indulge in his corrupt practices. Conniving with the authorities he manages to prove that the Chief is a mental patient. The Chief Doctor is removed forcefully to the Sixth Ward where he dies that very night.

The story, no doubt, is a little pessimistic. But the narration is done by a great humanist, the author, and the great pain that the story will create in the reader?s mind will make him more humane. Chekhov brings to life many more character in the course the story which will enrich the reader?s knowledge of life, of men and matters.

SATHYA

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