Katie Kennedy's Learning To Swear In America

Lewis Carroll once said, “In the end, we only regret the chances we didn’t take, relationships we were afraid to have and the decisions we waited too long to make”. In the “Death of Ivan Ilych” by Leo Tolstoy, the author highlights the big idea of the artificial life which is represented through everyone in Ivan's society and job. The authentic life is represented by Ivan’s Russian peasant. The theme is to live the right authentic life, and it is expressed when Ivan falls down the ladder, and wrong things both Ivan and his wife value. Ivan Ilyich has a moment of silence and reflects about his life.

It is a mystery that he will never solve. Death now seems meaningless because he has become uninterested in life. He had wrestled with the idea of death all night, sweating, turning grey, pissing himself, only to finally realize that since life has no meaning, death has no meaning and any effort that he might make from the moment he exchanges his life will be ineffectual.

In The Death of Ivan Ilych Leo Tolstoy conveys the psychological importance of the last, pivotal scene through the use of diction, symbolism, irony. As Ivan Ilych suffers through his last moments on earth, Tolstoy narrates this man's struggle to evolve and to ultimately realize his life was not perfect. Using symbols Tolstoy creates a vivid image pertaining to a topic few people can even start to comprehend- the reexamination of one's life while on the brink of death. In using symbols and irony Tolstoy vividly conveys the manner in which Ilych views death as darkness unto his last moments of life when he finally admits imperfection.

Death is a topic that unites all of humanity. While it can be uncomfortable to think about, confronting death in unavoidable. “Dying” addresses that discomfort and universal unwillingness to consider the inevitability of death. Pinsky’s use of imagery, symbolism, and tone create a poetic experience that is like death, something every reader can relate to. In “Dying,” Pinsky describes how people are oblivious and almost uncaring when it comes to the thought of death. Pinsky is trying to convince the reader that they shouldn’t ignore the concept of death because life is shorter than it seems.

In his novella, The Death of Ivan Ilych, Leo Tolstoy offers his audience a glance into the life and death of an ambitious man, Ivan Ilych. Tolstoy uses the death of Ivan Ilyich to show his audience the negative consequences of living the way Ilych did. Ivan Ilych followed society and made decisions based on what others around him conformed to and not so much about what he genuinely wanted until he was on his deathbed. As death approaches Ilych he realizes that he wrecked everything that should be meaningful in his life in order to work and make money and in the end his friends did not really care much about him. Ilych’s desire to conform made him live a miserable life and led him to darkness. Ivan Ilych attained everything that society

The death of Victor’s mom, Caroline, marks a turning point in his young life. Victor was a very close to his mother and lived a rather sheltered life meaning he is not onl losing a parent but a piece of his innocence. In Victor’s response to this tragic event in his life as well as its influence on his life’s ambitions, he uses the literary elements of tone, personaificiation and asks the reader a rhetorical uestion to convey his feelings. He utilizes each by taking on a sober tone, personifying death and

Yuri’s personal life also consisted of many tragedies including the deaths of her two oldest children, Billy and Aichi, her husband Bill, and the suicidal thoughts she suffered with her declining health. With each moment of grief, Yuri eloquently and sincerely conveys the sorrow she felt by glorifying how each one of them embellished not only her life, but the lives of many others who grieved with her following her children and her husband’s deaths. Yuri’s tragedies may have left her in extreme agony, but they each gave her another reason to live and impact the lives of many others.

When one is encountered with death, life’s meaning is revealed. We infrequently agonize over whether we live a healthy lifestyle until it is too late, as demonstrated in "The Death of Ivan Ilych” and “A Good Man is Hard to Find”. Both stories allow the readers to learn the consequences of living a completely selfish, non-Christian life. Through death, characters Ivan and the grandmother are encountered with conversion experiences, in which they reevaluate their own lives. O’Conner and Tolstoy exhibited the character’s reevaluation experience through similar themes in each story.

Ivan Ilych didn’t receive this type of hope directly. Instead he comprehended and understood his own death. By thoughtfully seeking redemption of his actions, not only did he transcend his seen environment to the unseen environment, he fully accepted the unseen environment. This speaks as though it is a storied environment in Ivan Ilych’s last moments. “”Death is finished,” he said to himself.

2. Ivan discovers about physical death that he comes to face to the dreaded, hateful reality of death. He talks to the voice of his soul about his death. When Ivan accepts the death, his son shows him if love can reverse fear, doubt and mistrust. Then, as he actually dies, he discovers that when he lets go of pain and suffering, life’s true direction is through death into unending life. He believes that he is being born.

The physical death he must face at the end scares him because it forces him to realize the life he has lived has been completely false. When confronted with death Ivan starts retracing his past, wondering what he has done to deserve such pain and suffering. He realizes when he is bed ridden that he was much more alive as a child then as an adult. In chapter five of The Death of Ivan Ilych, Ivan admits that “…the further back he looked the more life there had been. There had been more of what was good in life and more of life itself,” (Tolstoy 238). If one were to observe small children play, they would notice it does not take much to hold a child’s interest, and often they are much more fascinated by things that don’t work correctly then things that do. With the pressure to conform to society’s views of perfection as an adult, Ivan loses the liveliness he possessed as a child. Having to face death terrifies him because it forces him to admit he actually did not do the correct thing like he thought he did.

One major theme that is present in the entire novella is the inevitability of death. Death is something that happens to everyone. No matter how high your social status is, there will come a time when you will wither and die. It does not matter how rich you are or how poor. The major turning point in the story is when Ivan realized that he was getting closer to death every day. Ivan Ilych realized that the customs and traditions of the aristocracy which he had thought were important was the cause of his metaphorical death. He had lost himself while he chased after wealth, social status, and power. He had forgotten about how to live a simple, happy life. He had forgotten about the that there are other people whose concerns and issues that are much more important that his. He has been immersed in the mediocrity and artificiality of life that he has forgotten how it is to care and to love other people.

Soft but intense non-diegetic music is playing to highlight the increasing awkwardness of the situation and makes us question what is going to happen next. Taiki draws out a knife, reflecting moonlight, hinting the dangerously sharp weapon. He stabs Liwei, suspecting that he may report the whereabouts of the Japanese back to the Chinese. A dull cry is sounded and a mid shot of the knife piercing Liwei is shown, making the audience also feel pain. A slow pace non-diegetic tune is played, gradually speeding us and increasing in volume as death continues. Yuri kills Taiki, reinforcing the notion of betrayal, by also stabbing him, hoping that the Chinese would not suspect him as much. This is represented by a swift close up of Yuri’s knife plunging into Taiki’s stomach, displaying how quick death can be. The quick deaths can also depict friction between the two races, as no one though twice about killing the other. Everyone flees the scene, the camera staying put, the characters vanish off in the distance, and Yuri has been ordered to go back to Japan, though he plans not

They have just learned about Ilyich’s death, and they outwardly react in the way expected of them. However, these reactions are only for show; internally, each man approaches Ilyich’s death with a slight air of annoyance at the inconvenience the death causes, speculations about what Ilyich’s death means for his own career and his friends’ careers, and relief in the fact that, once again, another man has died instead of himself. Along with this feeling of relief also comes a sort of denial; the men all recognize that Ivan Ilyich is mortal, but deny their own mortality, believing death to be some isolated incident that only happens to other men. They go through the motions of one who has lost an acquaintance, only doing what is socially acceptable and moving on from the death at the first possible