![]() ![]() Tolstoy contrasts all of their attitudes towards death as something others do with Ivan’s experience of confronting his own death. ![]() Tolstoy shows us that Ivan’s colleges take a perverse sort of pleasure in knowing that it was someone else who had died rather than any of them life will continue for them. ![]() They were, as the living normally is, relieved that they were not dying themselves, but also simultaneously disgruntled by the reminder of their own mortalities that Ivan’s death brought. Ivan’s family and colleagues just see his death as an inconvenience. Leo Tolstoy wrote, “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.” This is a prime example of what we would have missed. The reaction to his death, on part of his friends and colleagues, is completely superficial. ![]() If Tolstoy would have never made the switch to third-person then we wouldn’t have known how Ivan’s colleges felt. The novella starts off when Peter Ivanovich, Ivan’s closest friend, finds out that Ivan has passed away by reading the obituaries during an interval in a trial. “Analysis of Leo Tolstoy’s Novella “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”” ![]()
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