Ivan Ilyich Suffering

Every person has a different perspective on what they believe death will be like. Every day there is someone in the world who is told they have very little time left to live. There are many different kinds of reactions to this tragic news. There are the people who are overwhelmed with fear and loneliness, people who have doubts or regrets about how much they accomplished in life, and people who try to ignore it or express their fear in making rash decisions. The main characters in the three stories “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” “The Metamorphosis,” and “Death Constant Beyond Love” perfectly resemble these many different reactions to death. Throughout history many authors have chosen to write about death and how they perceive it. These three stories
We are only given so little time on this earth to achieve everything we feel we are meant to do. This regret is expressed in the story “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” The main character in this story, Ivan Ilyich, becomes diagnosed with a fatal illness, and at this time everything he hasn’t accomplished begins to haunt him. Ivan spends his last days wondering why he could not have done things differently, whether it is in relation to his job, family, or social life. This is a fairly common reaction to some when they are told they only have so much time left to live. The author of this story, Leo Tolstoy, based some of his perspective in this story off of his own personal experience. In our book it notes that this story resembles his guilt of not caring for his own brother while he was dying of tuberculosis, but of thriving for his own literary fame (739). The story is written during the realism era in literature. The period of realism entailed literature that spoke of the true lives of ordinary middle class citizens. It spoke in much detail of the characters themselves, rather than the surroundings or plot of the story. Tolstoy incorporated this in “The death of Ivan Ilyich” by describing a middle class man who lived “the most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible” life. In doing that, it reflected his novel with the writing style of
Modernism is different from previous literature because modernists were more focused on the inner self. They did not care as much for nature, or spiritual beings. Modernists saw things as decaying because they lived during a time where the world was in disarray. Several wars broke out during the 20th century, causing the economy and world around them to start deteriorating. Many modernists wrote based on points that were not rational or clear. In the story “The Metamorphosis,” Kafka expressed this modernist writing when he talks about death. Although this story isn’t directly focused on the death, it reflects what the character had to go through leading up to his death. The Metamorphosis is about a man named Gregor Samsa who wakes up one day in the form of a roach. Samsa works at a job that he thinks is unpleasant but does not want to quit because he wants to repay his parents for the debt incurred from his schooling. To roughly summarize the story, he remains in the form of a roach and over time is slowly resented by his parents and sister. He begins to feel alone and as if he has no one anymore who cares for him. Because he feels so guilty for being such a burden to his family, Samsa eventually dies a lonely and sad death. This expresses the second kind of experience of death I had previously mentioned. Kafka drew away from the realism that Tolstoy showed by