Initially, the lawyer seems to suffer terribly from loneliness and boredom, and he requests "books of a light character": crime novels, love stories, comedies, and stories that seem entertaining. During the second year of his imprisonment, the lawyer seems not to read at all, but he sometimes writes all night.

During the sixth year, however, he begins to read zealously, and over the next four years, he reads some six hundred texts and learns six different languages. The lawyer then writes to the banker, his jailer, in those six languages and asks him to show the letter to experts in those languages. If there are no mistakes, he would like for someone to fire a gun in the garden so that he will know that his "efforts have not been in vain." He says that the "geniuses of all ages and countries speak in different languages; but in them all burns the same flame," and he expresses his happiness that he can now understand them all.

He seems to be motivated, then, by a desire to understand genius in all its forms from as many quarters of the world as he can. Moreover, he seems to want to understand humankind as well as possible. This is why he reads history and philosophy—these explain how we live, how we think, and why. It is no longer enough to be entertained, as he was by the reading material of his first year, and when he focused on himself alone in the second year—writing rather than reading—he learned nothing of the world. The next phase of his imprisonment, so to speak, seems to consist of a desire to understand the world and its people better.