The Theme of Hope in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich Essay

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.

In the short novel “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” Leo Tolstoy seeks to warn and hopefully save the souls of his readers from living empty lives by making an example out of the main character in the story, Ivan Ilyich. Although the main theme in the novel deals with death, Tolstoy presents a number of other themes such as: the need to live a natural balanced life not dominated by propriety and decorum, the dangers of living artificial lives governed by materialism, self-interest, shallow relationships, bourgeois societal expectations, suffering, and later on redemption and altruism. Tolstoy uses these themes as a way to convince people to live and pursue what brings them real happiness not to meet the expectations of others or society.

Viktor E. Frankl, an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist who also had survived the Holocaust, writes “When we are no longer able to change a situation – we are challenged to change ourselves” (BrainyQuote). Frankl survived genocide against his own people and still chose to have a positive outlook on it because he understands that if he did not, he would continually live an unhappy, upset life. Like Frankl, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, the main character in One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, contains a similar outlook to that of Frankl. The novel takes place during Soviet Russia in a gulag in Siberia, or otherwise known as a labor work camp. The whole book is about only one day that Shukhov lives; from 5 in the morning to 10 at night and all that happens in between. In this labor camp, not only are the weather conditions very cold, making it difficult to work in such circumstances, but also the workers are punished and harshly treated if they do not obey the guards. When placed in this environment, it is easy to be discouraged and miserable, but instead of facing the negatives of his situation, Shukhov remains affirmative in his thoughts – which are most important in order to survive not only physically, but also mentally. This stoicism portrayed in the narrative can also be found in Epictetus’s work, The Handbook. In this text, Epictetus discusses how he believes people can live a happy life, despite the hard conditions they are put through

Shukhov could not dwell on his past even if he wanted to due his situation in the camps. Little by little he forgot what life was outside of it. With spending 8 years in the labor camps, Shukhov had little to remind him what home looked like. “As time went by, he had less and less to remind him of the village of Temgenyovo and his cottage home. Life in the camp kept him on the go from getting-up time to lights-out. No time for brooding on the past” and “Since he’d been in the camps Shukhov had thought many a time of the food

In One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn shows how Soviet prisoners, known as Zeks, are treated while being in the gulag for one day through the eyes of the protagonist and omniscient narrator named Ivan Denisovich Shukhov. Despite being in an environment such as the Soviet Union, where there is harsh tundra and not much food to eat, Shukhov tries to make good use of what he has received while trying to keep himself alive. The purpose of Solzhenitsyn’s portrayal of food is to show its overall significance and that it is used as a means of trade and survival. Over time, the power of food reveals its significance to the Zeks and especially to Shukhov and food allows both groups understanding towards the necessity of food for their vitality and well-being additionally.

A Hope in the Unseen by Ron Suskind is an amazingly touching story for any future teacher. It gives hope to every student who is trying to make it in life. It enforces the importance of teacher expectations, human capital, and cultural capital. It touches on funding issues and the irrelevance of standardized testing. Cedric Jennings' life was everything but easy. He never had the opportunity to take the short, easy path, instead always being forced onto the long, winding road; in Cedric's case it gradually led to a world of success. Everyone, future teachers and others alike, should take the lessons in this story to heart, both as an example and as inspiration.

The work stirred many other Soviet writers to produce works describing their own situations of political imprisonment. Solzhenitsyn soon fell from the state’s grace, however, and was exiled when he attempted to published the first volume of a definitive literary-historical work on the Soviet incarceration system: The Gulag Archipelago. He moved to the USA, where he finished the other two volumes of his masterwork, and returned to Russia in 1996.

Many of Man's struggles are usually the result of societal standards, control, and punishment. These struggles are present in both One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Crime & Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Through setting and internal monologue, both authors depict the effects of the brutalities of communism on Man's spirituality.

In the first work, “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” a novella written by Leo Tolstoy, Tolstoy conveys a message of existentialism through the story telling of the life and the death of a man named Ivan Ilyich. The novella begins with an omniscient narrator describing the scene of Ivan’s old work

Time is a very important factor for those living in the camps. Each moment they can get that the authorities do not control gives them a feeling of freedom and hope. These spare seconds enable Denisovich to keep going, giving him time to collect his thoughts, and rest his work-weary body. "[T]hat moment ... belonged to the prisoners. While the authorities were sorting things out you stuck to the warmest place you could find. Sit down, take a rest, you'll have time enough to sweat blood."

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.

At this point, Solzhenitsyn begins his critique of the Western world; his first major point being the West’s “decline in courage” (2). “The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party and of course in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society” (2-3). Solzhenitsyn suggests—years ahead of his time—that the West is growing weary in their opposition of threats to their society, such as the Marxism-Leninism of the Soviet Union. This is what

Finally, Solzhenitsyn's novel expresses one of the most important Christian principles, hope for the future. In Christianity, since Christ paid the price for the sins of the world, there are no lost causes. Christians have faith that Christ will return someday and that there will be a heaven. In the same way, in the midst of the terrible conditions of the prison camp, Shukhov can be pleased at

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.

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