One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich Character Analysis

Register to read the introduction… There are criminals and peasants, artists and intellectuals, even former government officials and officers. In this, it becomes apparent that writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn is not only writing about the Gulags, but also offering readers a way to experience different aspects of Stalin’s the Soviet Union through his telling of the prison camps. This paper will explore a few of these characters, including Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, Alyosha the Baptist, Fetiukov the scrounger, Captain Buinovsku, and Senka Klevshin, while attempting to relating them back to society and the different people that existed within the Soviet Union. We begin with our narrator, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov. Shukhov, a former World War II soldier, describes his life before being arrested and sent to the camps as being simple. He lived in a village and worked on a farm. Throughout the novel, readers learn that Shukhov is very good with his hands. He is an engineer in that he is constantly building and creating things. One of these things includes his trusty spoon, a spoon which he crafted …show more content…
Senka’s history is one that could merit its own novel. He was a soldier in World War II, had his hearing destroyed in battle, was captured by the Nazis, held in a POW camp, but escaped multiple times, and finally ended up in the gulag. Outside of this, the rest of the 104th squad, as well as the readers, don’t know much about Senka. Because of his deafness, Senka keeps to himself, preventing the other prisoners from getting to know him. However, when Senka speaks in the novel, he must be heard. Shukhov explains in the novel that while Senka is typically silent, the second he speaks, everyone is