Proust and Tolstoy: Comparison

A detailed Summary of Proust and Tolstoy: Comparison

Memories, everyone needs them; and a good way of remembering personal memories, is to write them down. In the two stories, "Remembrance of Things Past," and "The Death of Ivan Ilych," the authors do just that. Marcel Proust's, "Remembrance of Things Past," is a novel that documents the romantic, social, and artistic coming of age of the narrator, bringing him to the point where he reconciles the two symbolic "ways," of his childhood memory: Swann's Way (the way of love) and the Guermantes Way (the way of society). In the story, "The Death of Ivan Ilych", Leo Tolstoy writes about the reactions of a man, Ivan, and his friends, to his suffering and death. Although different in approach, both authors write their stories about personal life memories and experiences.

In "The Death of Ivan Ilych," Ivan is thinking back on his life as he lies on his deathbed. All that he wants is pity and there is no one there to give him it besides his servant Gerasim. Ivan starts to show signs of

beginning to realize how he treated life. He treated life with the utmost propriety and tried his very best not to let his emotions get in the way of how he acted. This is shown when Ivan says, "What if my whole life has really been wrong?" while looking at Gerasim peacefully sleeping at his side, the only one who shows the slightest bit of pity and sorrow for him. Ivan's wife is falsely concerned in his condition; she is only worried about the inconvenience his suffering is putting her through and the financial bind his death puts her in. Even close friends and family around him are stoic; his daughter can only think about the delay in her marriage, his colleagues are solely concerned about what promotions will be made after his death, and the doctors are only concerned about the disease and not the patient. In the end, Ivan realized he had lived his life with no emotion, and is now not receiving any emotion or sympathy near his death.

These two stories are not exactly the s

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 666
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English

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