World Literature

“Oh terribly! He screamed unceasingly, not for minutes but for hours. For the last three days he screamed incessantly. It was unendurable. I cannot understand how I bore it; you could hear him three rooms off. Oh, what I have suffered!”

Picture a wife complaining about her dying husband’s relentless screaming on his deathbed and one has entered a scene from The Death Of Ivan Ilych’s first chapter. More precisely, it is the scene from the above passage. The speaker, newly-widowed Praskovya Fedorovna, is recalling her spouse’s last days to a family friend – Peter Ivanovich. What so remarkable about this paragraph is Leo Tolstoy’s subtle sarcastic tone in Fedorovna’s dialogue. In the first couple of sentences, Fedorovna appears to the audience as how any woman would when her partner passes away, sorrowful and despondent. But as one proceeds along the dialogue, he or she will find pieces of her fallen mask, slowly unveiling her true color – an egotistical and emotionless upper-class woman. When she cries: “It was unendurable.”, most of the readers probably assume that she is referring to her husband’s suffering. Yet, interestingly enough, it is revealed in the next sentence that she is actually describing her own agonizing pain from hearing Ilych’s constant screaming. Logically, the screaming represents the level of pain Ilych was enduring. However, it seems like the more he screamed (or the more pain he went through), the more irritated Fedorovna got. And to top it all, she whines: “Oh, what I have suffered!” at the end of her speech. In a way, it is almost funny how all her complaints are better suited if they were spoken by her late husband, the one who was actually dying from an illness. This is a prime example of how the author uses irony to further emphasize Fedorovna’s narcissistic nature. Leo Tolstoy truly did a phenomenal work in shaping Fedorovna’s characteristics through her dialogue.