A Confession · Chapter
V explained
The narrator describes his desperate search for the meaning of life across all branches of knowledge, finding that neither experimental nor abstract sciences provide a satisfactory answer to the question of why one should live in the face o
What happens
The narrator describes his desperate search for the meaning of life across all branches of knowledge, finding that neither experimental nor abstract sciences provide a satisfactory answer to the question of why one should live in the face of inevitable death. He concludes that science either ignores the question or merely restates it, leaving him in despair.
Themes in this chapter
The Search for Life's Meaning
The narrator's central quest is to find a meaning in life that death cannot destroy, driving his investigation of all sciences.
Reason vs. Faith
The narrator contrasts the limited answers of reason and science with the deeper question of life's purpose, highlighting the inadequacy of pure rationality.
Death and Mortality
The inevitability of death is the core problem: the narrator seeks a meaning that survives death, and science's failure to provide this leads to despair.
Characters to notice
- Narrator
The narrator recounts his exhaustive and painful search for life's meaning in science, leading to the conviction that knowledge cannot answer the question of why to live.
Key passages
“My question—that which at the age of fifty brought me to the verge of suicide—was the simplest of questions, lying in the soul of every man from the foolish child to the wisest elder: it was a question without an answer to which one cannot live, as I had found by experience. It was: “What will come of what I am doing today or shall do tomorrow? What will come of my whole life?””
The narrator states that his core question, which drove him to the brink of suicide at fifty, is universal and simple: what is the ultimate outcome of all his actions and his entire life?
This encapsulates the existential crisis that motivates the chapter's inquiry.
“I sought in all the sciences, but, far from finding what I wanted, became convinced that all who like myself had sought in knowledge for the meaning of life had found nothing. And not only had they found nothing, but they had plainly acknowledged that the very thing which made me despair—namely the senselessness of life—is the one indubitable thing man can know.”
After searching all sciences, the narrator concludes that not only have others failed to find life's meaning, but they affirm that life's senselessness is the only certain knowledge.
This highlights the narrator's despair and the perceived failure of science.