How does Tolstoy Use his Characters to Show Materialistic Life - Essay Example

Ivan Illyich, the central character of the novella belonged to the upper-middle class. He was educated and had a comfortable status in society. A judge in the high court in St.Petersburg, with a wife and family, lives an ordinary life. Throughout his life he never cared to reflect on the meaning of life.

The humdrum nature of his career was more or less determined by the mechanical compliance to external compulsions of the values of a defunct society. In the smug satisfaction of the motorized perfection of life there lay a terrible pitfall. As Tolstoy puts it, his life was "most terrible and most ordinary and therefore most terrible." Tolstoy shows the readiness of Illyich to succeed in life, by spontaneous compromises of all principles of life, as the hallmark of contemporary ethos. This makes his hero ludicrous.

He had the semblance of the typically reserved nature of a judge but in actual practice was very flexible, if it will augment his career: " There were services rendered to his chief and even to wife of his chief". The feverish pursuit for advancement without principles is a disintegrating force and only a spiritual realization can provide meaning as we prepare for the inevitable exit from this life. The shock comes in the form of the diagnosis of a terminal condition of cancer. His failure to grasp its wider significance is conveyed by the myopic textbook notion of the death of a modern man.

He understood the meaning of death from a logical point of view but did not grasp its significance for himself: " Caius is a man, men are mortal, and therefore Caius is mortal. "It is revealing that though Illyich was slow to grasp the significance of his death, others were conscious of the advantage they have at his death. The irony of the situation is that even his family, for which he worked, longed for his death. The novella ends in the heroic reconciliation of the protagonist. Illyich realizes that death is not the end of everything.

In his aloneness, he discovers the abiding companion of his life, Jesus: "There was no fear because there was no death. In place of death, there was light. In place of death, there was Jesus."The story of Ivan Illyich tells us the insensitive nature of modern techno-culture.