Death’s Implications: Analyzing The Death of Ivan Illych Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Illych has proven to be a profoundly important work in the understanding of mortality. By adding to this understanding, Tolstoy implores readers to accept the ultimate reality that death is inevitable. If there is one thing Tolstoy makes quite clear, it is that nobody lives forever and death can be a horrifying, painful, and sobering experience. Ivan Illych, a successful man of the law, ends up fatally injuring himself whilst putting up curtains. With his health in decline, the reader gets to experience death through Ivan’s eyes. Tolstoy attempts to have the reader feel the same anxiety that Ivan feels and in some sense the same pain. And indeed, Tolstoy brilliantly conveys this agony to the reader. Specifically, Tolstoy decides to focus on two very important threads of the cloth that makes up death. From Ivan Illych’s perspective, Tolstoy focuses on regret with one’s life and the utterly different mindset the dying adopt versus the living. For Ivan Illych, climbing the social ladder of entrenched Russian bourgeois society was the ultimate goal. Particularly, Ivan would use his career in the law to allow him to obtain such heights. This led to Ivan placing his family on the back burner whilst his own career and ambitions would enter the limelight. Once the end is near however, Ivan begins to feel regret take hold of himself. “It occurred to him that what had appeared perfectly impossible before, namely that he has not spent his life as he should have done, might after all be true … his professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family, and all his social and official interests, might all have been false” (Tolstoy ... ... middle of paper ... ...ty. Therefore, death can be a very lonely experience that isolates people. George R.R. Martin once said, “Death is so terribly final, while life is full of possibilities.” Indeed, death is the ultimate reality that we all must face. Leo Tolstoy’s main character Ivan Illych, faced this reality himself. And unfortunately, Ivan Illych faced his end painfully full of regret. While the The Death of Ivan Illych is an exploration of mortality, it also sends a very distinct message. It’s not too hard to gather that Leo Tolstoy wants his readers to live a fulfilling life. Instead of focusing purely on careers and social status, it’s more important to focus on family, love, and friendship. Also, it’s a key part of life to accept that death is inevitable. It’s simply unrealistic to live in denial with dreams of immortality. In essence, live life happily because it’s too short.
The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy tells the story of Ivan Ilyich, a man who deals with a mysterious illness through introspection. Until his illness, he lived the life he thought he was supposed to live. Like Candide, he was living in blind optimism. He assumed that what he was doing was the right thing because he was told as much. He had a respectable job and a family. Happiness, if it did occur to him, was fulfilling his duties as a husband and father. It was his sudden illness that allowed him to reflect on his choices, concluding that those choices did not make him happy. “Maybe I have lived not as I should have… But how so when I did everything in the proper way” (Tolstoy 1474)? Ilyich had been in a bubble for his entire life, the bubble only popping when he realizes his own mortality. This puts his marriage, his career, and his life choices into perspective. Realizing that he does not get to redo these choices, he distances himself from his old life: his wife, his children, and his career. All that is left is to reflect. This reflection is his personal enlightenment. He had been living in the dark, blind to his true feelings for his entire life. Mortality creates a space in which he can question himself as to why he made the choices he made, and how those choices created the unsatisfactory life he finds himself in
Though illness stripped both Morrie Schwartz and Ivan Ilych of their hope for survival, their dissimilar lifestyles led each to a much different end. Morrie found himself in an overflow of compassion while surrounded by family, friends and colleagues. Ivan, on the other hand, found only the obligatory company of his wife and the painful awareness that no one really cared. Both characters ended their lives the way they lived them, as Ivan acknowledges: "In them he saw himself" (Ivn, 149). While Morrie poured himself into every moment of life and every relationship he pursued, Ivan skirted the dangers of emotion to live "easily, pleasantly, and decorously" (Ivn, 115). In the spirit of such an opposition, the two stories become somewhat like responses to each other. Morrie Schwatrz, proclaimed...
Why does the story begin with the death? Most books use mystery in the beginning and announce the death at the end. But Tolstoy used a different chronology, he started with the death of Ivan and then uses a flashback to show the reader what really happened. Also he chooses to start with the death to make the story seem real and not fictional. At Ivan’s funeral, nobody seemed devastated by the loss of Ivan, which gave the reader an understanding of how little Ivan’s life meant to the people even the ones close to him. Later in the reading, but before his death Ivan questions how he lived his mortality life and what if he lived his life properly. Before his death he had come to the realization that his death would benefit all the others around him. "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" begins with the death of Ivan in order to get it out of the way. In essence the
It is important that everyone lives their lives according to God’s purpose for them. Many people in today’s society fear death. Those who fear death have little to no knowledge about what God has planned for all of his children. On the other hand, some people fear death because they feel as though they have not fully completed their life’s purpose; or lived accordingly. This work brings about many real-life situations. There will always be people who use others to advance their own lives. Then there will be people who want the best for others. Continuing a study of this work will allow readers to make a connection to his or her current society. The Death of Ivan Ilyich is an easy read, that will automatically catch the reader’s
Outside knowledge is gained by reading or by being taught something from a teacher. From reading the book The Death of Ivan Ilych, I gained outside knowledge about the upper class. In the beginning of the book Ivan Ilych passed away. The book is all about how his coworkers take his death throughout the book. The book mentions:
When I know that money doesn’t matter in life it’s the connections to people and your family that make your life mean something special. While Ivan is screaming for two hours in bed in pain he says to his family “forgive”, but it came out “forget.” This is when he is fighting death and notices that his whole life he has been living it wrong and took everything for granted. As long as he and his wife “ moved in the best circles and there home was frequented by people of importance and by the young.”(Tolstoy 61) Ivan regretted all of this because he noticed that he was not just killing himself but his family as well. It took Ivan way to long in my opinion to see all the problems in his life, his wife and son truly loved the man and just wanted a happy family instead of the game they been playing. Both of these two men were trying to find away from death in their lives but always new it was coming you could say it was
What would you do if you knew you were dying? Some people go out and do crazy things with their last days on earth. Other people spend time making their lives right and spend time with family or friends. To be honest, I am really not sure what I would do. In this paper, I am going to compare Leo Tolstoy’s title character in “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” to Chi Tien-Hsin’s unnamed character in “Man of La Mancha”. Both men are faced with death. Ivan knows for certain that he is close to death. On the other hand, the guy in “Man of La Mancha” does not have a chronic illness. The way that these two men behave when they are thinking about dying is completely different. The way they act shows their overall character, and it shows what kind of person
Although we as a society have advanced and made people’s lives easier, our mental suffering is as present as ever, due to our incessant need to have everything perfect. We seem to forget that the fascination of living comes from the imperfect and the unexpected. In her essay “On the Fear of Death” Elisabeth Kubler-Ross suggests that the modern age, while increasing life span and ease of life, has at the same time given way to a “rising number of emotional problems,” amongst the living (Ross 407). She also suggests that because of modern society’s progress, there has been an increased anxiety towards death. While Ross is writing for twentieth century society her ideas apply to the nineteenth century as well, when Tolstoy wrote The Death of Ivan Ilych.
We are all condemned to death; it is inescapable. Even if a person doesn’t believe in the concept of destiny, it is undeniable that every person is fated to die at some point. Most people, however, are not aware of when exactly the inevitable will approach. Often in works of fiction, the reader, or sometimes even the character, is aware of their fate. There are many different understandings of destiny, which is one of the reasons why it has played such a large role in so many different literary works throughout the world and history. Fate is one of the principal literary devices used in Homer’s epic poem, The Iliad, Shakespeare’s tragic play, Antony and Cleopatra, and Tolstoy’s pedagogical novella, The Death of Ivan Ilych.
Ivan Ilyich, a decorous man with a life deemed perfect by society, gradually becomes aware of his life’s dark secrets, which cause him to feel excluded from his family and society. The tone is set by Tolstoy in the very beginning of the novella - as Ivan Ilyich’s colleagues receive the news of Ilyich’s death, the first thing they can think about is whom amongst them will receive a promotion. Moreover, at the funeral, Ilyich’s wife worriedly asks his colleague for some advice about her pension. These events foreshadow how “Ivan Ilyich’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible” (1427). Ilyich leads the life society tells him to lead, which first becomes clear before he decides to marry - “The marriage gave him personal satisfaction, and at the same time it was considered the right thing by the most highly placed of his associates” (pg. 1430). And even though he is disgusted with law, he considers it righteous and honorable when he see...
A vivid description of the state of mind behind the question is also to be found in Tolstoy's `My Confession', where the great Russian enquires, `Is there any meaning in life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?'
Tolstoy provided us with two perspectives to view Ivan’s life in “The death of Ivan Illyich”: an omniscient narrator and Ivan himself. What I plan to do is give another perspective, not necessarily to view his life, but rather to his experiences after he realized he was dying. This perspective will be an analytical and psychological; the perspective from Kubler-Ross’s Stages of death (or stages of grief, as they are better known for). These stages occur when we are faced with an event that is usually connected with death. The “normal” order in which these five stages occur, though may not go doctrinally in this order, are as such: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance.
The story The Death of Ivan Ilych does a great job of explaining not only the events leading up to the death of Ivan Ilych, but what defines a person. Throughout the story, we get a deeper understanding of what character is and how it effects someone. Ivan had many different views of the world and in turn had many different character traits. Some of his traits were moral, some social, some were emotional. These traits are not only what makes up Ivan Ilych, but what defines a person. These traits are a persons
Leo Tolstoy, author of The Death of Ivan Ilyich, suffered numerous tragic losses such as his parents and his aunt, Tatyana Ergolsky who created a tremendous impact during Tolstoy’s childhood. Overtime, Tolstoy was cultured and for Tolstoy it was common within his community. During the 1840, Tolstoy developed a strong, eager interest for the studies of moral philosophy. In The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy suggests that although people can find happiness in materialism, they need spirituality during a crisis.
In Wislawa Szymborska’s poem, “On Death, without Exaggeration”, the idea of Death is assigned characteristics of Deaths waged war against numerous quantities of emerging life that, itself, destroys life. Szymborska grew up in Poland during the Second World War, she was surrounded by Death, in addition, the experiences she had helped her to cope with Death and remain hopeful. The poem seems to make the reader think Death is an inevitable part of life and in order to appreciate life one must accept Death. However, if you read closely in the last line of the second stanza, “which is always beside the point” (7), Death is revealed to be indifferent, not accepting. Szymborska uses persona, irony, and personification to create rich