Tuesday, February 22, 2011

What is the exposition, complication (rising action), climax, anti-climax, and denouement of The Death of Ivan Ilyich?

Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan
Illych
follows the following plot
outline:


Exposition:
We see Ivan's life as "climbing a ladder."  He's a "cog in
a machine," a good member of a Czarist Russian bourgeoisie, getting married, having
children--but totally unhappy, spiritually
unfulfilled.


Complication:
We realize he's dying spiritually.  We realize that he's
been living a life based only on social expectations, an unfulfilled life, never
developing meaningful relationships with family or friends.  It's all about money,
status, possessions.


Turing point:
He falls while CLIMBING A LADDER and HANGING
DRAPES, symbolic that his life has been a climbing of the rungs of the social ladder.
 There's a shift in the verb tense from past to present.
Death becomes real. Life is being lived for
the first time, ironically, in
death.


Anti-climax / falling
action
: the doctors and his friends are no help; they only make suffering
worse.


Resolution: Ivan must
come to terms with the fact that his senseless life caused
his ridiculous
death.


Denouement: Tolstoy
presents his worldview:


  • Ivan must let go of all
    justification of his life.

  • He has a major
    revelation

  • He starts to feel universal compassion for
    people whom he had been hating.

  • He dies content--this
    compassion sets him free from the hate, jealousy, and pettiness that had been holding
    him back.

  • The moral center of the work is
    the servant, GerĂ¡sim, a member of the peasant
    class

  • This works as a metaphor for
    Tolstoy's brand of Christianity

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