The end of chapter 9 in The Death of Ivan Ilyich reads, “And when it occurred to him, as it often did, that he had not lived as he should have, he immediately recalled how correct his whole life had been and dismissed this bizarre idea” (102). Ivan struggled internally about whether his life had been a waste or not before finally coming to the realization that it had not been the “the real thing”. This internal dialogue was prompted because death was imminent. As suggested in the NPR broadcast, death is the teacher in the novella that prompted thought about truth in the life of Ivan Ilyich.
Characters in the novella each had a sort of script that they live by which is not the real thing. During the broadcast, the panelists talked about how most of the characters trivialized death because they were never faced with it. Death was something distant, as shown in the quote, “he’s dead, but I’m not” (33). Thus, it is easier for these characters to stay in their script filled with materialistic aspirations. Due to the fact that they are not removed from their scripts at any point like Ivan Ilyich was, they cannot understand truth in the way Ivan came to.
Ivan was able to come to an understanding that his life was not the real thing because he was disciplined by death in a long process. Tolstoy wants us to watch out for this in the beginning of the novella because he starts it off with death as being an arbiter that is in control of the setting. Therefore, we are able to see the process of death, see how it teaches Ivan to change his thought process, and see it take him out of his script, which is not “it”. Though death tortures Ivan, it eventually allows him to see far more clearly than those around him.
Tolstoy uses Ivan to show that there is no getting around death, but uses the eventual understanding of his mortality to point out to Ivan that his former pleasures were not “it”. Surely, death was a successful and unfortunate teacher of truth in this short story.
-George the Reader
The Rowhouse 