E.C.

In the beginning of "The Death of Ivan Ilych" Ivan Ilych is materialistic and ignorant. His views on what he sees as most important are monetary success, an important job, and pleasing his wife. He does what ever he can to get a high paying job in the law courts so that he can find what he thinks is happiness for himself and his wife. It is no surprise that his idea of what will make him happy is similar to the social map of his culture, which says that in order to be happy ones life must be easy and sophisticated. Much of his original views and his cultures views on how to be happy consist of tangible items. The map that Ilych is provided, that he unwittingly follows, tells him that if he wants to be happy he has to make money and have nice and expensive things.

However Ilych changes his ideology completely towards the end of the book. His sickness which was inadvertently caused by his materialistic attitude allows him to see that his values and the map were a waste, serving no real purpose in living a meaningful life. His understanding that he is going to die is a way of him realizing the lost cause of following the map of social stigma. He comes to terms with the fact that he will die and that nearly everyone will die without living a meaningful life, a life that is truly lost and has no substance past acceptance by his culture. Ilych is showed how useless the map he followed was, all it lead him to was a wife who he hated and a "floating kidney" which leads to his death. He finds no meaning of what he was supposed to do and is left feeling like he wasted his life.

Ilych definitely should have lived differently, he should have lived spending less attention and time on things that only looked good to others and offered no real happiness or meaning to his life. He should have spent less time trying to be accepted and live properly. It is unfortunate that he did not realize that until the end of his life and even then didn't fully comprehend what he did wrong: "Maybe I did not live as I ought to have done," it suddenly occurred to him. "But how could that be, when I did everything properly?" (chapter 9) It was because he is convinced these things will give him happiness that he dies feeling like his life was a loss.

I think that in many ways it is Ilych's wife, Praskovya Fedorovna's fault for Ilych's obsession with having unnecessary things that give a false sense of happiness. Praskovya Fedorovna pushed Ilych causing him to feel that he desperately needed to have things like monetary success to be happy. And because Ilych did follow societies rules and the map set for him he followed what Praskovya Fedorovna leads him to believe. It is Ilych's unusual circumstances that allow him experience what he is told will make him happy and then realize why they were a waste that offered him no meaning, making him enlightened but too late.

I think that one quote that shows Ilych's confusion between what his expectations the map would bring and its reality is:

"It is as if I had been going downhill while I imagined I was going up. And that is really what it was. I was going up in public opinion, but to the same extent life was ebbing away from me. And now it is all done and there is only death.”