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One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich Essay

Decent Essays

Some people criticize the book for not having a plot or that it isn’t effective because it only deals with one day of the prisoner’s life. Yet if the author hadn’t made the choices like shrinking the horizon of the reader so they would understand what one day was like, writing in the third person, or how the book consists of a lot more descriptions and thoughts rather than conversations. All of these choices that the author made was for a reason and is what helped the book become what it is now. By shrinking the reader's horizon and forcing to only look at one specific day of Shukhov’s, it really paints a picture as to what they actually had to deal with everyday. This is a lot different than other books that fall in the same genre, many …show more content…

One major point is that he never actually describes the main character with adjectives and traits. He only describes him through his actions and his preferences. These so called descriptions mainly consist of things that Shukhov thinks while watching the items, scenery, and people around him. This makes it much harder for the reader to connect with him and his experiences because when you can’t put a face to a person it becomes difficult to figure out their character and personality. Yet rather than describing the characters Alexander goes more in depth of describing the things that surround the characters such as “the windows iced over and the white cobwebs of frost all along the huge barracks” and how “his coat and jacket tightened, and he felt something pressing against the left side of his chest...It was the edge of the hunk of bread” (Solzhenitsyn 5, 47). The reader's emotions didn’t come from the character and what he had to, but rather the things around him. The author described everything from the “water right under the guards’ valenki” to how “the office was as hot as a Turkish

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