The orchard's auction is viewed as an urgent call for decisional practical measures.Your father was a peasant; mine was a chemist; it doesn’t prove anything. Shut up, shut up…If you offered my twenty thousand pounds I would not take it. I am a free man; nothing that you value so highly, all of you, rich and poor, has the smallest power over me; it’s like thistledown floating on the wind. I can do without you; I can go past you; I’m strong and proud. Mankind marches possible on earth, and I march in the foremost ranks.In the last act, the characters are closely scrutinized. Trophimof refuses Lopakhin’s loan offer, which shows how the student’s youth and idealism are in pathetic contrast with Lopakhin’s maturity and common sense. Such is also seen with the nave Madame Ranevsky.Madame Ranevsky looks at the orchard and sees her childhood happiness, former innocence and the embodiment of her best values. By these and many other contradictions, the audience views the orchard as an ambiguous and poetic symbol of any human life that is in a state of change. She is incapable of adapting, which is shown when she gives away her purse to peasants at her door. This is a gesture showing her failure to be realistic about her financial circumstances and her paternalistic affection for all that the orchard stood for in the past as well.Oh the sins that I have committed…I’ve always squandered money at random like a madwoman; I married a man who made nothing but debts…I fell in love and went off with another man; and immediately---that was my first punishment---a blow full on the head…here, in this very river…my little boy was drowned; and I went abroad, right, right away, never to come back anymore, never to see this river again…. I shut my eyes and ran, like a mad thing, and he came after me, pitiless and three years I knew no rest day or night; the sick man tormented and wore...
