The Death of Ivan Ilyich

Ivan's plump days atomic number 18 spent in terrible physical agony, as he uncontrollably screams and moans in pain. When Ivan's friends come to pay their adores to his widow, we meet in her comments to them that she never re all toldy cared that more than for her husband. According to her, Ivan's last three days were worse for her than the deceased himself, "It was unendurable. I cannot substantiate how I bore it; you could hear him three rooms kill" (Tolstoy Ch. 2).

The story contains significant existential elements in the sense that Ivan never considers his mortality until it is too late for him to lead a purport more fulfilling. So, too, we see that all of the social proprieties that Ivan adhered to during his "simple" and " popular" life are socially constructed value and rituals that are typically a sham compared to reality. For example, Ivan's friends care about getting fore in their careers and the continuation of their bridge game more than they do about Ivan's loss. This is because despite many people leading simple, common lives in regularize to follow by rote either social propriety espoused by the status quo, these lives are mostly lives of pretense and unfulfilling. Ivan recognizes this when he thinks, "It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered bully by the most highly move people, those scarcely noted impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false

Ivan comes to this recognition in part because he has struggled to get the wool from in await of his eyes and the culturally constructed valuations our of his psyche during his illness in order to find a meat in life. In so doing, in chapter 5 he realizes his wife does not heat him and his life is one of alienation. Ivan's answer for a meaning in life comes in the form of his nurturing servant Gerasim, and is also provided him via his male child who is able to understand, empathize with, and accept his father's fate.

Ivan realizes that the things most "highly placed" people frown upon ? honesty of emotion, honesty of feeling, celebrating nature and universal over economic pursuits, etc. ? are the true joys of donjon and the only ones that are truly fulfilling. It is these simple, ordinary, human aspects of life that fade meaning to it, not the attempts to live up to the expectations of cultural values that are created and perpetuated by those who are just as unsuccessful as Ivan, deny mortality just as much as Ivan, and never find true joy and meaning in life like Ivan. Tolstoy uses the metaphor of a inexorable sack in Chapter 9 in order to symbolise the struggle Ivan must go through to discover this ethereal truth ? a painfully honest reassessment of his life. With respect to this issue and his life, Ivan recognizes "I was going up in public opinion, but to the same extent life was ebbing out-of-door from me" (Tolstoy Ch. 9).

Tolstoy, L. The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Available: http://faculty.stcc.cc.tn.us/bmcclure/links2/ilyich.htm, 1886.

"So that's what it is!" he abruptly exclaimed aloud. "What joy!"

While some readers and critics of this story view this as a Christi
Order your essay at Orderessay and get a 100% original and high-quality custom paper within the required time frame.