There are many symbols is the short story by Leo Tolstoy The death of Ivan Ilyich. The most significant symbols are the black sack and the border around the death notice. In this essay, I will try to outline several other symbols in the short story and analyze them.
The border is the first symbol that appears when reading the story. Ivan Ilyich’s friends notice an obituary in the newspaper, which was framed with a black border. The border symbolizes how small and insignificant a person’s life may be. Everything that a correspondent need was a black border. The point is that black border means the life of Ivan Ilyich: as well as the border isolated the obituary about the protagonist’s death; he isolated himself from others. Even his close friend knew anything about his disease.
Another significant symbol is the big black sack. For the first time, it appears in the novella in the ninth chapter, when Ivan Ilyich is given opium for the first time. In the opium haze, he feels falling into a big black sack. He realizes that he will never reach the end of the sack. However, suddenly he does that; he comes through the black sack’s bottom. In this episode, the big black sack resembles a tunnel that some people go along while in clinical death. The big black sack changed the protagonist. After that dreams, he began to reevaluate his life and even had a though that he spent the entire life wrong.
In one of the last chapters, the big black sack appears again. This time, Ivan Ilyich tries to struggle against an invisible force that tries to pull him into the sack. It hurts him much to be into it. When speaking about the symbolism of the big black sack, we may say that it represents Ivan’s life. All his life long, he was in the darkness and only the death can bring him light. We, as well as Ivan Ilyich do realize that he did not live his life the way he should have lived it. Though, his father was proud of him, he had friends; the point is that his life was useless. He realizes that before the death.
One of the symbols of the novella, in my opinion, is the funeral of Ivan Ilyich. The author tells us about the funeral in the first and the second chapters. In my opinion, the funeral represents the indifference and greed of the Russian society of that time. Here, we see the greedy widow, who is trying to get more money because of her husband’s death. Besides, there are indifferent “friends”, who want simply to show up and leave the funeral for poker game. It seems that children of Ivan Ilyich are the only, who suffer from their father’s death. The same situation was in the Russian society in that time: people were trying to find some ways to get money or to have fun. In my opinion, the episode with the funeral of Ivan Ilyich was one of the brightest episodes in the novella. Besides, its symbolism cannot be underestimated. it shows not only the way Russians lived in the nineteenth century, but also the way we should not live nowadays.
Resources:
Kaufman A. Understanding Tolstoy. 2011. Ohio University Press
Tolstoy L. The death of Ivan Ilyich. N.d. Web. 18 March 2014
