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The Death of Ivan Ilyich
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Chapters 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary
Ivan Ilyich sleeps less and less, finds foods distasteful, and must rely on others to assist him with daily hygiene. He finds comfort with Gerasim, his butler’s assistant and now de facto sick nurse, whose cleanliness and sense of purpose contrast with Ivan Ilyich’s own. Everyone else around Ivan Ilyich is most concerned with “whether he would soon vacate his place, and at last release the living from the discomfort caused by his presence” (283).
While others avoid Ivan Ilyich’s suffering and inevitable death, Gerasim puts aside his to-do list to spend time making Ivan Ilyich more comfortable. He is the only person who fully acknowledges Ivan Ilyich’s coming death; others insist on treating Ivan Ilyich as though “he was not dying but was simply ill” (285). Ivan Ilyich wants to tell everyone, “You know and I know that I am dying. Then at least stop lying about it!” (285), but cannot bring himself to say it. Though Ivan Ilyich longs “to be petted and comforted” but continues assuming “a serious, severe, and profound air” that he thinks is proper for “an important functionary” like himself (286). This repressed longing for human compassion leaves him feeling poisoned by “this falsity around him and within him” (286).
Chapter 8 Summary
Days, weeks, and hours are becoming the same for Ivan Ilyich, an indistinguishable blur of “gnawing, unmitigated, agonizing pain” and “the consciousness of life inexorably waning but not yet extinguished” (287). His doctor continues downplaying Ivan Ilyich’s condition with “contemptuous affability” (290), and Praskovya Fedorovna insists that a specialist examine Ivan Ilyich for her sake.
The celebrated doctor visits, bringing with him a temporary hope of diagnosis and recovery. This hope doesn’t last long, and instead of improving, Ivan Ilyich moans in pain. He is given an injection and sinks into oblivion (291).
Ivan Ilyich awakens and takes his dinner with difficulty. His family prepares to attend the opera, and he resents their liveliness and normalcy despite having insisted they go without him. Lisa is now betrothed to Fedor Petrovich, an agreeable yet unremarkable gentleman, whom Ivan Ilyich agrees to meet before the party leaves for the opera. Ivan Ilyich notices that his son, who “had always seemed pathetic to him,” now looks at him with frightful pity (292). Ivan Ilyich cannot hide his indignation with his family, “staring with glittering eyes straight before him” as a silence falls over the group (292); still, he imagines that his son understands him. When the family leaves for the opera, Ivan Ilyich feels a brief moment of relief in their absence, but his pain and fear quickly return, and “the inevitable end of it all” becomes “more and more terrible” (293).
Chapter 9 Summary
Praskovya Fedorovna checks on Ivan Ilyich upon her return from the theater. He agrees to take opium for his pain to make her go away. In a “state of stupefied misery,” Ivan Ilyich imagines he is “being thrust into a narrow, deep black sack” (293). He struggles as he is pushed further and further, but cannot reach the bottom of the sack.
When he awakens from his opium-induced dream, Ivan Ilyich dismisses Gerasim. Left alone, Ivan Ilyich speaks to God and listens for the first time to the voice of his own soul. He cries at his own “helplessness, his terrible loneliness, the cruelty of man, the cruelty of God, and the absence of God” (294). He wishes to no longer suffer and instead to live well as he used to (294). This brings him to question whether he has, in fact, lived well. There was “light-heartedness, friendship, and hope” in his younger years, but “the further he departed from childhood and the nearer he came to the present the more worthless and doubtful were the joys” (295). The most pleasant times of his adult life now seem trivial.
Ivan Ilyich questions the meaning of life and the reasons for his suffering. He wonders if perhaps he hasn’t lived “as I ought to have done” but immediately dismisses the thought (295). He cries and keeps returning to the same question: “Why, and for what purpose, is there all this horror?” (296), but still resists considering whether he has lived his life correctly.
Chapters 7-9 Analysis
Until this point, the novella has rested on a foundation of dramatic irony—a literary device that allows the reader to know more than the characters do so that their actions weigh more heavily. The title and opening chapter has told us that Ivan Ilyich is going to die, so we have been reading with this in mind; however, only in this section does the character himself understand his fate.
We also now see the novella’s circular structure wrap around. Ivan Ilyich moans continuously in Chapter 8—the same moaning that Praskovya Fedorovna complained to Peter Ivanovich about in Chapter 1 at the funeral service.
Ivan Ilyich’s imminent death shifts the protagonist’s outlook. For the first time, he plumps the depths of his psyche, and this reveals to him the shallowness of his family life. Those around Ivan Ilyich resist acknowledging that he is on his deathbed, practicing the same kind of self-delusion that Ivan Ilyich perfected during this adulthood. Instead of pitying Ivan Ilyich “as he wished to be pitied” (286), they focusing on the discomforts Ivan Ilyich’s suffering puts upon them—exactly the same thing that he would do when escaping from the tragedies of his private life into his work and dismissing his wife’s grief as unpleasantness. Ivan Ilyich acknowledges this “falsity around him and within him” as the most poisonous aspect of his final days (286).
Ivan Ilyich’s dream of being pushed into a dark sack symbolizes his struggle in coming to terms with death. The image is one of forcible burial—the idea of being interred against one’s will. Still, he dismisses the question of whether he has lived as he ought to have done, concluding that doing things properly must be enough. Despite the cracks in his self-deluded veneer, Ivan Ilyich is avoiding “the sole solution of all the riddles of life and death” (295), but we can see epiphany on the horizon.
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