Shock and Wasted Life in Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych

Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych deals with the slow realization of a dying man that he has essentially wasted his life, and want and he may, he will never get another chance to live it. The story’s second chapter begins, “Ivan Ilych’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.” While for some this first sentence may have created some literary tension, or even oxymoron, it did not faze me at all, and I in fact passed over it without notice until it was brought up in class discussion. This sentence did not faze me because it made complete sense to me. Whether or not you believe in an afterlife, you only get one chance at life itself, and aside from living a corrupt and evil life, nothing could be more terrible than a simple and ordinary one.

I went to sleep immediately after reading the first two chapters of Tolstoy’s story the other night and I had a dream. I had a dream that I was dying; I was dying at seventeen years old. All I could think about was that I was too young to die. Statistically speaking, I’ve probably already lived somewhere between one-fourth and one-fifth of my life, but what bothered me in my dream was knowing that I would die without doing so many of the things I’ve wanted to do with my life.

Perhaps Ilych felt the same way as he lay on his deathbed. He had lived his entire life after childhood by his own golden rule of doing whatever others (society) thought to be appropriate, and repressing his desires to do what he wanted to do. Although Ilych may not have become consciously aware that he had “not spent his life as he should have done” until mere days before his death, this knowledge of his wasted life may have been in his subconscious for quite some time. Ilych groaned, and in the end screamed, in agony as he slowly died, and it is mentioned many times in the story that Ilych’s agony was more of a mental nature than a physical one. It would seem the most logical explanation for this mental agony is that Ilych could sense something disturbingly wrong, more than just the fear of death, even if he did not know what this wrong was at the time.

This wrong is the fear of a wasted life, which lay in Ilych’s subconscious until he became aware of it in his final days, as evidenced simply by his rejection of his impulses to do what he wanted if these impulses went against society’s standards. Perhaps during your life you have experience the shock of driving down a road in the wrong direction for a couple of hours, or losing a term paper when your computer crashed, because you knew (all at once) that you had “wasted” that short bit of your life. Essentially, this shock is the same one that Ilych is dealing with on a grand scale, realizing all at once that he has wasted his entire life, and that he would have no chance to live again. And it is this shock that sent him into screaming “so terrible that one could not hear it through two closed doors without horror.” (562)