Comparing Death Of Ivan Ilych 'And' The Love Song Of J
1746 Words7 Pages
Akhil Muttreja
Professor Sylvor
English 2850
May 15, 2015
The Mortal Beings
Both texts “The Death of Ivan Ilych”, by Leo Tolstoy, and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, by T.S. Eliot, convey this aspect of mortality through the main characters. Tolstoy uses mortality as the physical fact of death for Ivan Ilych. Ivan’s agonizing pain is the result of the ways he lived his life and treated his relationships. Ilych views people as a means to an end when he should be considerate of their feelings and emotions. This ingenuine way of life causes his life to end. Ivan Ilych believes that time is running out for him to be forgiven by his family, which turns out to be false when they forgive him in his final hours. In both texts, the importance…show more content… Before this quote, Ilych regards his health in medical terms, as if medicine can cure him back to full health. However, now, he must cope with his illness being inescapable. When he realizes that he will face an unavoidable death very soon, he sees how obvious it is to everyone else around him. He questions his peers’ actions and wonders why they have been avoiding the subject. Specifically, his wife, Praskovya Fedorovna Golovina, because she does not seem to care about the fact that her husband is dying right in front of her. She knows that he has a finite amount of time left, yet she still avoids spending time with him throughout his…show more content… Prufrock expresses his awareness that his time will come eventually, when he refers to seeing the “eternal Footman”, who is symbolized as death. By saying it is holding Prufrock’s coat and snickering, he means that death is just waiting for Prufrock and taunting him. As he ages, Prufrock feels his own mortality mocking him, which makes him worry that he has not lived life to its fullest potential. Although he is conscious of the fact that he is now in the second half of his life, he still feels that there is always going to be time. He denies his lack of time by telling himself that he still has all the time in the