The priest strewed earth upon Gusev and bowed down. They sang "Eternal Memory."

The man on watch duty tilted up the end of the plank, Gusev slid off and flew head foremost, turned a somersault in the air and splashed into the sea. He was covered with foam and for a moment looked as though he were wrapped in lace, but the minute passed and he disappeared in the waves.

He went rapidly towards the bottom. Did he reach it? It was said to be three miles to the bottom. After sinking sixty or seventy feet, he began moving more and more slowly, swaying rhythmically, as though he were hesitating and, carried along by the current, moved more rapidly sideways than downwards.

Then he was met by a shoal of the fish called harbour pilots. Seeing the dark body the fish stopped as though petrified, and suddenly turned round and disappeared. In less than a minute they flew back swift as an arrow to Gusev, and began zig-zagging round him in the water.

After that another dark body appeared. It was a shark. It swam under Gusev with dignity and no show of interest, as though it did not notice him, and sank down upon its back, then it turned belly upwards, basking in the warm, transparent water and languidly opened its jaws with two rows of teeth. The harbour pilots are delighted, they stop to see what will come next. After playing a little with the body the shark nonchalantly puts its jaws under it, cautiously touches it with its teeth, and the sailcloth is rent its full length from head to foot; one of the weights falls out and frightens the harbour pilots, and striking the shark on the ribs goes rapidly to the bottom.

Overhead at this time the clouds are massed together on the side where the sun is setting; one cloud like a triumphal arch, another like a lion, a third like a pair of scissors. […] From behind the clouds a broad, green shaft of light pierces through and stretches to the middle of the sky; a little later another, violet-coloured, lies beside it; next to that, one of gold, then one rose-coloured. […] The sky turns a soft lilac. Looking at this gorgeous, enchanted sky, at first the ocean scowls, but soon it, too, takes tender, joyous, passionate colours for which it is hard to find a name in human speech.

Basic set-up:

This is the end of Chekhov's short story, "Gusev." The title character, Gusev, who fell ill on a ship journey, has just died and is being buried at sea.

Gusev is nobody. He's poor, he was in the army, and he's on some trip. Chekhov's deliberately focusing on just a regular guy, your average Joe—er, sorry, your average Ivan.

The narrator of this story is super-duper omniscient. He's so all-knowing that he even knows what's going on with the fish and the sharks in the ocean.

What's so unique about the ending of this story is that it leaves the human world and enters the natural world. Up until this point, we've been with Gusev and the other characters up on board the ship.

But as Gusev's body enters the water, so does the omniscient narrator. We see the shoal of small fish approaching Gusev's corpse, then we see the shark swimming under Gusev "with dignity and no show of interest." In the last paragraph, the narrator goes so far as to tell us what the ocean is feeling. Whoa. With this kind of super complete knowledge of both the human world and the natural world, it's almost as if this narrator is actually God.