Simington Nick World Literature 01/22/2008
IVAN ILYICH: MAKING A DIFFERENCE OVER A HUNDRED YEARS LATER The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy begins with the death of a judge named Ivan Ilyich. After the funeral, the story shifts to thirty years earlier to describe Ivan's life. After attending law school, Ivan becomes an examining magistrate in the reformed judicial institutions and moves to a new province. Ivan becomes encompassed in his work and less engaged with his family. Ivan seeks the lifestyle that is proper and decorous in society's view. Ivan continuous to move up in promotions in his work but lower in standing with his own family. With the new promotion Ivan moves his family and takes extreme pride in furnishing his new home to keep up with society and make himself feel elite. While furnishing his home, Ivan falls off his step ladder and injures his hip but it does not seem like a serious injury. Ivan then finds a great interest in the game bridge. Ivan's hip starts hurting and he gets an unusual taste in his mouth, the doctor's cannot figure out the reasoning for this which makes him afraid and depressed. He loses interest in cards and mortality is running through his mind. Ivan loses all interest for his wife and cannot hide it. As Ivan is dying he gets annoyed and outraged with the way he is treated. All of his visitors try to pretend he is not dying and will not confront it. That is until Ivan's peasant servant talks to him and truly cares for him. His peasant and a moment with his son make him find for the first time in his life, his inner soul. For the next twelve days after hearing his inner soul speaking to himself, Ivan looks back at his life and realizes the more joy there was. Ivan also realizes that as he thought his life was getting better and better with promotions in jobs and societal approval, it was just like the pain, getting worse and worse. Ivan cannot understand the senselessness of death. Ivan views an image of being shoved into a black sack that he fears going into but at the same time wants to see inside the sack. Just then
Nick Simington World Literature 01/22/2008
a force strikes Ivan in the chest and hip and shoves him into the sack where he sees a bright light. He realizes he lived an artificial life with his family, work life and social life. He suddenly feels great joy, takes a large sigh, stretches out and dies. The story of The Death of Ivan Ilyich,
takes the reader through the battle of inner life versus outer life and what truly is important. The modern day man believes that their outer self is what is truly important. They often are searching to get the most money or the fanciest car when truly where happiness comes from is the inner self. Too many times the inner self is pushed back until it is often too late. The Death of Ivan Ilyich demonstrates perfectly a problem that man has struggled with for many generations. Sparknotes.com describes the inner life versus outer life battle that Leo Tolstoy depicted in The Death of Ivan Ilyich as, "Up until Chapter IX, Ivan is a purely physical being. He shows no indication of any spiritual life whatsoever. He lives for the benefit of his own flesh and relates with others only insofar as they promote his desires. Worst of all, Ivan mistakes his physical life for his true spiritual life. He believes that his existence is the "right" existence, and he refuses to see the error of his life. As a result of denying the spiritual, Ivan is incapable of transcending the physical. He experiences excruciating pain, overwhelming unhappiness, and absolute terror. Yet when the prospect of his death forces Ivan to confront his isolation, he gradually begins to see the importance of the spiritual life. As he grows toward understanding, as he supplants the physical with the spiritual, he moves beyond suffering, conquers death, and experiences extreme joy. Tolstoy's message is clear: the task of each individual is to recognize the duality of the self and to live so as the less important physical life conforms to the more important spiritual life." In the last pages of the story it is described of his inner self being awakened, "Suddenly some force stuck him in the chest and side, making it still harder to breathe, and he fell through the hole and there at the bottom was a light. What had happened to him was like the sensation one sometimes
Nick Simington World Literature 01/22/2008 experiences in a railway carriage when one thinks one is going backwards while one is really going forwards and suddenly becomes aware of the real direction." It then continues, "Just then his schoolboy son had crept softly in and gone up to the bedside. The dying man was still screaming desperately and waving his arms. His hand fell on the boy's head, and the boy caught it, pressed it to his lips and began to cry." Through all of Ivan's torturous pain and agony, Ivan has finally been spiritually reborn. As Ivan's hand is falling on his son's head, his epiphany is happening. The epiphany brings joy and the understanding of life to Ivan. He understands the battle of outer being and inner being. With the touch of his son, it brings Ivan great pity for the wife and son but has broken down the barrier he has with others. "Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible." This quote was pulled from chapter two and is one of the most famous quotes in Russian history. This quote is directly correlated with the physical being that is very popular with American society. Ivan lived his life in seeking this "ordinary" life and societal views of life's goals. Ivan chose his career and career goals by what society would see as most respectful. He was the definition of a conformist. His values, actions, desires, and overall behavior were determined by the opinions and expectations of society and his social superiors. This is how he chooses his friends and his wife. He marries his wife because it is the right thing to do. Ivan is so completely overwhelmed in doing what society expects from him that he has zero freedom and individuality. The closer Ivan gets to be simple and ordinary as society expects, the more he truly has a terrible life. In chapter three when describing how Ivan tried to fit in and exceed society by furnishing his house when in reality it just proved how ordinary and simple he was the author says, "In reality it was just what is usually seen in the houses of people of moderate means who want to appear rich, and therefore succeed only in resembling others like themselves."
Nick Simington World Literature 01/22/2008 Wikipedia's interpretation of The Death of Ivan Ilych points out this spiritual and physical battle in their interpretation, "Christians have often embraced the apparent conversion or redemption of Ivan Ilych at the end of the story. Ivan Ilych sees the light and cries out, "What Joy!" Indeed, the novella was written soon after Tolstoy had a conversion experience. Tolstoy's Christianity, however, was always a quirky one, focused on the life of Jesus as a model of love in action. There is, for example, no definite indication of life after death in "The Death of Ivan Ilych," only the powerful depiction of the man's experience of dying. Many people have different interpretations for the end of the novella. One such interpretation that is Ivan Ilych's whole struggle and agony ends with the great gift of a cessation of suffering. Another interpretation is that Ivan Ilych's breakthrough is the freedom that comes with truth-in his case, seeing the falsity of his life, which enables him to have a brief moment of unselfish love or at least compassion for his wife and son." Wikipedia interprets with many different possibilities and trying to get into the authors mind. Through all these interpretations it all has one similar underlying fact. Ivan Ilych's battle of inner life versus outer life and even that the story was told because the author experienced his own inner life spiritual experience. The author asserts the reader on the life Ilych lived and the meaningful relationships he had with friends, "The more intimate of Ivan Ilych's acquaintances, his so-called friends, could not help thinking also that they would now have to fulfill the very tiresome demands of propriety by attending the funeral service and paying a visit of condolence to the widow." This was Ivan's closest friends and it shows how his greatest friends had no care for him and only attended in respect to the widow. It is heartbreaking to see when the wife is not sad either and only cares about the money she will receive from her husband's death. The author shows how she has an inability to understand her inner life as well and she is still stuck in the rut of conformity and societal norms. Unfortunately Ivan only learned the true meaning of life and spirituality in his last weeks. He realized the relationships he had with his "friends" and family and probably didn't expect different for his funeral. It is unfortunate to see a man
Nick Simington World Literature 01/22/2008 realize his inner being in his last days and have to be remembered by his outer being that he lived by for his entire life. The author goes on to speak about the relationships Ivan had with his friends and coworkers when they are speaking about his death in chapter one and say, "Besides considerations as to the possible transfers and promotions likely to result from Ivan Ilych's death, the mere fact of the death of a near acquaintance aroused, as usual, in all who heard of it the complacent feeling that, `it is he who is dead and not I.'" About.com continues with a description of the relationships Ivan had and lack of inner self in the characters, "Tolstoy makes a quite stringent attack on the hypocritical morals and pointless lives of the upper-middle classes. As Ivan dies, his family and friends are consumed with greed and thoughts of personal gain--not because they are naturally evil or wrong, but because they cannot understand what Ivan came to see. They don't understand that the ups-and-downs are nothing compared to the power of the soul and of God." Novel guide describes this battle Ivan Ilyich battles his entire life, "Ivan Ilyich finds himself living in a world of false appearances. His whole life has been spent doing what's right in the eyes of society. His house, his wife and his family only care about this front of propriety. Only a few moments before his death does Ilyich finally realize that he is empty inside, that his whole life has been spent achieving the wrong aims. Every notion of rightness ultimately proves to be wrong for him. Only through the laborious suffering of his illness does Tolstoy's protagonist finally discover truth. Though he's physically alive throughout the work, he only becomes spiritually alive in his last moments." The relationship his wife had with Ivan and her self-absorbed outer life view was apparent early on in the story when she is speaking to Peter Ivanovich, "Praskovya Federovna (Ivan's wife) explains her husband's final day of agony saying, `It was unendurable. I cannot understand how I bore it; you could hear him three rooms off. Oh, what I have suffered!" Then later in the story Ivan Ilyich says to him self regarding his life decisions, "I was going up in public opinion, but to the same extent of life was ebbing away from me. And now it is all done and there is only death." When Ivan dies he views this as the death of his outer
Nick Simington World Literature 01/22/2008 being and the birth of his inner being. Just like Novel guide describes when they say, "He only becomes spiritually alive in his last moments." Ivan views death as finished when he says, "'Death is finished,' he said to himself. `It is no more!'" He is joyous his life he lived that he was working his whole life to just die and now his inner being can be born. The path that led to joyous inner being born first started by a common feeling that all humans feel and that is a fear of death. As Bookrags.com describes it, "Tolstoy was plagued for most of his life with a fear of death. He came to realize, as the character of Ivan Ilyich demonstrates vividly, that the closeness of death can create a healthy urgency in life. Ivan Ilych only becomes aware of the superficiality of his social propriety because of his proximity to death." Tolstoy expresses this awareness what Ivan is quoted saying, "It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false." The goal of this story by Leo Tolstoy is to get the reader to question how they live with the outer and inner self. Online-literature.com explains the purpose of the story further, "The Death of Ivan Ilych is the classic romantic monster story re-told in a truly human and realistic way. The monster in this short novel should scare the reader more than any other. The novel's story of an un-thoughtful man forced to deal with his death should get the reader to think of the topic themselves--if you do this you will be drawn in and love the self analysis it provides." Gradesaver.com goes along with describing this gap between inner reality and outer appearance as, "The gap between inner truth and outer appearance becomes apparent nearly every time two characters speak to each other. Hypocrisy is a way of life for the novel's characters, as nearly every statement is made to hide real motivations and feelings. Worse yet, most are at some level aware of the gap, and choose to ignore it. As Ivan Ilych grows more ill, the hypocrisy in the world around him hurts him as much as his sickness. In Gerasim (his
Nick Simington World Literature 01/22/2008 peasant servant), that gap does not exist, and Ivan Ilych is struck powerfully by the peasant boy's example." Leo Tolstoy does an exceptional job of depicting the difference between inner and outer self and the importance of being true to your inner self. Tolstoy uses an effective way of giving the visual of how ludicrous it is to be completely enthralled in societal approval and materialistic happiness. Tolstoy truly makes the reader question the way one is leading their own life. If they are searching to get the most money or the fanciest car when truly where happiness comes from is the inner self. Too many times the inner self is pushed back until it is often too late. The Death of Ivan Ilyich demonstrates perfectly a problem that man has struggled with for many generations