The Death of Ivan Ilyich It occurred to him that what had appeared perfectly impossible before, namely that he had not spent his life as he should have done, might after all be true. It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly place people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false. And his professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family, and all his social and official interests, might all have been false. He tried to defend all those things to himself and suddenly felt the weakness of what he was defending. There was nothing to defend. But if that is so, he said to himself, and I am leaving this life with the consciousness that I have lost all that was given me and it is impossible to rectify it- what then? Tolstoy paints for the reader through the discourse of The Death of Ivan Ilyich a social statement on the insignificance and banality of sociological conformity from a variety of viewpoints all perceptible to the reader from many sociological class structures. What we find in The Death of Ivan Ilyich is a way of life, a comparison that defines for the reader a method of living outside that of the accepted sociological norm. This new take on life extends through the above passage as a method by which humanity can asses its place, its role, and the crucial role of the individual in the personal success of the human individual. In this paper, I plan to outline several points used by Tolstoy through a means of sociological placement (i.e. Work, family, social attributes and practices) as a means of describing the true death as portrayed in the work, and how the realizations of a dying man shape Tolstoys personal beliefs on life and the construction of personal and individual acclamation. In the above passage, Tolstoy delvers to the reader several...
