Tolstoy’s theme of life and death is universal and holds true even today. In the Death of Ivan Ilyich, the author narrates Ivan Ilyich’s journey towards death: the denial, the fear, and the alienation. When Ilyich is on his death bed, he realizes that he has failed to live rightly. As he dies, the reader realizes that death of the body is false, and is the start of a new life and a new truth. It is a journey of the soul that continues even if the soul parts with the body. Tolstoy also points out that a meaningless life is also a kind of death. The novel is a dig at the Soviet society that Tolstoy lived in. It’s an attack on the empty values of the people. Although Ilyich’s life is that of a well-educated man who is relatively prosperous, the entire direction of the novel till his death shows the falseness, insincerity, insensitivity, and spiritual inadequacy of his life. Tolstoy’s idea of death of the body and the immortality of soul is similar to Socrates. Ilyich’s death seems like an exit from a hollow life and an entry to the glorious after life. Ilyich’s last statement “there is no more death” points that death is a continuous journey (Tolstoy, 154).
Through the protagonist, Tolstoy tries to show that the fear of death goes away if the person has lived his life with the correct attitude of compassion, pity and kindness. The novel tries to tell us that the fear of death can be overcome by living rightly. Only death can redeem Ilyich from his empty, materialistic life, since it a process of living and not an end to life. Tolstoy tries to show that the process of dying is not a reflection of life, but rather an obstacle that leads to clarity and peace in heaven. In the end, Ilyich’s death releases him from all the suffering and his recognition of the inevitability of death changes his entire perception of life.
Works Cited
Tolstoy, Leo, Richard Pevear, and Larissa Volokhonsky. The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. Print.
