Reviews - The Death of Ivan Ilych: Annotated

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The Death of Ivan Ilych: Annotated

The frightening meditation on death was not a particularly pleasant experience to read. The whole thing is dripping in fear, and yet just seeing this potentially worst case scenario drawn out in words dispels some of the unknown, and the unknown is the most frightening aspect of it all.

In the final minutes of Ivan's life, he overcame his death in the sense that his dying had been a tormenting experience and he had finally arrived at the end of it. It is as though his last breath wasn't his death, but something pure. His death was the agonizing process of getting there.

The scariest metaphor in the book was shown during the heights of Ivan's pain, the feeling that he was slowly and inevitably being stuffed deeper and deeper into a narrow black sack, one that never seemed to end. At the moment of overcoming his 'death' he is finally pushed out of the end of this black sack and experiences a sensation similar to being on a train and thinking you are moving forward only to look up and find the opposite to be true.

I was moved by the 'Rosebud' experience of Ivan replaying the greatest memories of his childhood in his final days. In that moment I first thought about my own sweetest memories, both those of my cherished childhood and my life today. I then realized that just as I now look back on my childhood self and see this clueless boy unaware of his future self looking back on him, I now feel the heavy eyes of my eventual doomed body staring back at me. I hope I can forget this feeling, shake this experience of feeling the weighted lids drooping over the best moments of my life, but even if I can't, then at least I know this experience is shared. Even if what I feel isn't real, nor what I will someday see when I look back, nonetheless, as I look into the future to my inevitable death I now see my own eyes staring back at me.