Illness and Nothingness of Being in The Death of Ivan Ilyich

Leo Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich is the story of a man who reconciles with his deteriorating self as sickness besets him and catches him unaware in a materially satisfying life. This paper studies the constitution of self and how it transforms as one actively grapples with imminent death. It further explores Ilyich’s reconciliation with his end to go beyond his perceived conscious reality to realize the totality of self which allows no dualities. Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943) asserts that nothingness haunts being at all times. Nothingness is always a part of being but the values of the time one lives in preclude this unison with a totality of self in the moment. He calls this living in bad faith. In this context, this paper studies Ivan Ilyich’s illness as the articulation of the ‘nothingness’ of his being which eventually helps him understand not just his death but also his life hitherto. I assert that the first section of the story is an articulation of living in bad faith and that the discovery of the totality of self is attained by Ivan Ilyich in the second part, on his deathbed. His transcendence is not so much a product of an impending death but the retrospective acceptance of its ubiquity, which placates him. The protagonist dies announcing, “death is finished.” This is read and analyzed as a declaration of him having transcended into the realm of nothingness to reconcile with his complete self. The completeness of the self comes with the acknowledgment of its various possibilities but it is precluded because of the way the for-itself works: “The possible is the something which the for-itself lacks in order to be itself” (Sartre 102). By extension, it can be said that Ilyich’s journey is read as overcoming the deceptive force of the for-itself. In the moments of reconciliation, death and life become coextensive. This facilitates the acceptance of death as a permanent part of life such that it ends with life itself.