One Day Identity

A theme that persists throughout the camp narrative in One Day is the necessary ability to work to achieve a cohesive relationship with the camp and to exist with purpose. Ivan’s (or Shukov’s) camp mates make an effort despite their differences ethnically and culturally to have an identity that assists the group. Although the ideas of many of them may conflict, there exists the persistent and ultimate goal to survive as, without work, there are no guarantees that everyone will make it back to their bed. It is in this fellowship that enabled the beseeching of individuality beyond one’s prior identity possible; it was an identity beyond animosity and the strife—which came with imagining the past life outside the camp. It was through the pursuit …show more content…
“But the 104th had arrived—and life had come back to the building”, and it was this energy that portrays an overarching analogy for Solzhenitsyn’s personal experience in the Gulag camps (Solzhenitsyn 47). Individuality was something that was stripped from the prisoner’s beings upon entering the camps. One was taken away from their family and what one knew to, fairly or unfairly, be witness to their crimes against their protective entity, the state. Almost as God had cast them out of heaven, they existed as though a skeleton of whom they were. However, it was the salvation within themselves through friendship and a higher significance in the order of the 104th that overthrew that conviction, as Solzhenitsyn himself exclaimed, “it dawned on me that I had not spoken out of conviction”—for what had been his ideas about himself—” but because the idea had been implanted in me from outside”, and that had made him what he was (Gulag 174). Solzhenitsyn's own experience in external unfreedom of the camps gives validity to his assertion that true freedom is possible even in the most restrictive human …show more content…
Not surprisingly, Solzhenitsyn depicts the characters in One Day as individuals who, in the midst of external unfreedom, maintain their individuality. "To look at them, the gang was all the same-the same black overcoats and numbers-but underneath they were all different" (One Day 16). The Prisoners are externally stripped of individuality and worth, as they are clothed in black coats, pants, and hats with painted numbers for identification. Each has a different past, however, and a particular story surrounding their conviction. The characters retain the stories that make them who they are. The prisoners share these stories with each other in an affirmation of their humanity and individuality, which brings them together. Remembering his past, Shukhov resists the lie communicated by the gulag’s institution and the painted identification number. His inner freedom expresses itself as he jokes with his fellow prisoners and his seniority: “Never been out in the cold in Siberia before? Come and warm up under the moon like the wolves” (One Day 190). He alludes to his home and who he is in this statement. He is a being of aggressive life and find comfort in a light of himself even though it is not the true sun of external freedom. Shukhov refuses to relinquish his particular story, his past, and his individuality. For Solzhenitsyn, resistance to