The Death of Ivan Ilyich

Teddy Manfre Ms. Blass ENG 209-001 March 15, 2017 Ivan Ilyich’s Traumatic Death Leo Tolstoy is a Russian Realist who is known for being a great writer in the Nineteenth century. In one of his famous works “Death of Ivan Ilyich” he writes about a man named Ivan Ilyich who is a man with two important life values which are being a part of the high class, and being accepted by everyone around him. Being that Ivan Ilyich views himself as just a common person in his society, he is unsatisfied with…

Budington Kelland once said “My father didn’t tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it” (Fletcher). Both The Death of Ivan Ilyich and The Metamorphosis end with the main character dying a tragic death. When examining the cause of death for both Ivan Ilyich and Gregor Samsa, there are different factors that play roles into bringing about their deaths. Ivan was sick physically, but the cause of him becoming sick is unknown. In a similar way, Gregor could have died from some damage…

boredom, general annoyance with the mundane of daily life, and in the case of literature, the eventual need to significantly improve said situation. Ennui, in many variations, is found in works such as Madame Bovary by Gustav Flaubert, “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” by Leo Tolstoy, and the poem “To the Reader” by Charles Baudelaire from The Flowers of Evil. I will be discussing the prevalence of ennui within these stories and the importance of the subject in literature. In Madame Bovary, the tale…

Greedy Individuals: Hermann and Ivan Ilyich One of the evils of society is greed. Greed becomes a famous theme in many works due to the fact that it gives readers a glimpse of reality, rather than fairytales and romances. However, authors such as Alexander Pushkin and Leo Tolstoy used the theme of greed to expose humans in their materialistic nature. According to Money and Mad Ambition: Economies of Russian Literature by Jillian Elizabeth Porter “traditionally conceived as a sharply negative…

The Falsehood in Life and the Clarity of Death “Everything progressed until it began to approach the ideal he had set himself” (56). Ivan Ilyich lives his entire life according to the exact ideas and specifications that he expects of others and thinks others expect of him. He does everything, from marrying his wife to having children to decorating his house, the way that others have done in order to keep up the appearance of a happy, normal life. Ivan’s obsession with the way he appears to…

In the novel of The Death of Ivan Ilyich and The Picture of Dorian Gray, both main characters landed up in a place of desolation and unhappiness through their heavy pursuit of what they thought would give them happiness. Both characters started off young with a large potential for happiness by following their own individual pursuits, but instead the route that they took ultimately lead them down a slippery slope of tragedy and melancholy. They followed a way of denial from the factors that would…

Benjamin Franklin once said, “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” In these three works the former concept is thoroughly discussed. These books revolve around the question of death and how it can affect people’s lives currently. A common theme amongst these books is the depressing, dull picture of a life that is not lived in surrender to God Almighty. In The Sunset Limited, Cormac McCarthy outlines White’s desire to escape into a world of nothingness. White…

instance, Deanne Thompson suffered from a stage IV cancer that turned her two of vertebrates into dust. When a person enter stage IV of any form of cancer, usual treatments such as chemotherapy or medication; death is usually the only ending. Despite of the incurable disease and her fear of death, she did not completely retreat from the world. Thompson continue to teach students about theology and how God had worked in her life. She hold onto the belief that since God had sent Jesus to suffer…

The ability of one to face the chilling truth of his or her own mortality is a vital one, and Tolstoy makes this clear in his novella The Death of Ivan Ilych. He uses Ivan Ilych as an ordinary, relatable person to express his opinion that facing one’s own mortality is a vital part of the end-of-life process, and it is the single most important method to be able to work towards peace at the end of one’s life. Tolstoy’s story is still read commonly in the present day due to the degree to which he…

Ivan Ilyich’s Downward Spiral into Redemption The way Ivan gains redemption in the story is through a divine process that is able to save his soul. Through this redemption he comes to the understanding that he unwisely devoted his life to a value system that is devoid of actually accepting death as a possibility. He has lived a very simple, ordinary, and terrible life because he lives exactly as the value system of propriety and decorum wanted him to live and did not really live for himself.…