Ivan Denisovich Character Analysis

It is always astounding to me how much a person can go through, still persevere, and survive. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel is a great example of this. Throughout the novel, Ivan Denisovich, a Russian Solder that has been wrongly accused of treason, is a prisoner of a Siberian labor camp. He must not only learn to survive on limited food, hard labor, and negative forty-degree weather, but he must learn to keep his identity in a place where the guards refer to him as a serial number, Shcha-854. In spite of this, he must learn to hold on to the little humanity he has left. The limits the human body and spirit can take is, again, astounding, and is always more than one would expect. I feel it would do a disservice to those who have lived through dire situations like those that Ivan had gone through if I would compare his story to situations in my own life. Not once in my life have I gone through situations like those that he did. I have never experienced extreme hunger, nor have I ever had to worry about surviving in extreme …show more content…
I am of the firm belief that as long as your actions do not harm another person, then you should be able to partake in those actions. Too often, in today’s times, we see governments and citizens attempting to prevent others from participating in actions that they want to. From the war on drugs to same-sex marriages, people have banned together to prevent others from doing what they want because of some perceived universal morality. While we may not currently have any labor camps in the United States, it is important to understand that we have, and currently do, imprison people for their actions that some consider harmless. Repeat drug offenders constitute roughly half of our current inmates, and, in the past, part of our country would imprison people for their