Comparing catcher in the rye to the death of ivan ilych
- This is a preview of the essay.
To view the full text you must login!
In The Death of Ivan Illych, by Leo Tolstoy, and The Catcher in The Rye, by J.D. Salinger, we as readers witness how two drastically different individuals toil with the same challenge of living a genuine life. Although both characters experience pain, solitude, and ultimate confusion during their struggle, they confront these feelings at different times in their lives and deal with them in different fashions. Holden, the main character in Catcher in the Rye, is tortured by the superficiality and hypocrisy in the world around him from the beginning of his venture into adulthood, and throughout the novel is continually attempting to find his way in a place that he feels he doesn't belong. Ivan, the main character in The Death of Ivan Illych, embraces the non-genuine life or artificial life of shallow relationships, self-interest, and materialism up until the time of his death whereupon he realizes he has been living for the wrong reasons. At the end of both novels, we learn similar lessons, but the effect is accomplished in two different ways.
From the beginning of the Death Of Ivan Illych, Tolstoy makes clear that there are two types of lives: the artificial life and the authentic life. Tolstoy gives us Ivan to represent those who move through life infatuated with their annual incomes, how they are respected by society, and how well they fit into the norm. He is the poster boy for the artificial life, a life without substance and true meaning...