Poor Ivan Ilyich is plagued by not one, but two illnesses. While his “floating kidney” ends his life, it is a temporal illness – which is in fact cured as his kidney disease progresses – which ruins his life. Ivan spends his life in a small temporal space – he has managed to “reject his past” (51) and spend his life focusing on his physical attributes and social status. In his writings, Tolstoy went to great lengths to combat this condition, “the prejudice of… [temporal] closure” (8), which he saw as pervasive in Russian society. But curiously, in addition to the characters in the story who have this closed vision, the story of the first chapter - and the first chapter alone - shares this unhealthy perception of time to the extent that we can assume that a story conveys a certain attitude to with regard to reality. time. This singularly sick chapter aims to implicate the reader in the attitude that the book then sets out to destroy: “Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Ivan's temporal illness is first recognized in the first line of the second chapter, when the narrator tells us that the Ivan's life had been "simple and banal". - and the most horrible" (49). Where is the horror, if not in the simple mundane events of Ivan's life? This seems to lie in Ivan's approach to life, which the narrator accuses of the of Ivan to life when, in censorious terms, he tells us that Ivan "had succumbed to sensuality and vanity" (50 Sensuality suggests much more than an erotic approach to life - and us). We know from the text that eros was not a driving force in Ivan's life. Instead, sensuality indicates a worldview focused on sensual or empirical information rather than thought or emotion. Ivan's preoccupation with empirical, and therefore immediate, things implies a temporal narrowing When Ivan recognizes his temporal illness in the weeks before his death, he understands that what he gave up for his sensuality was. is the “friendship and hope” of his youth (119). Friendship, something he had abandoned, is a condition that binds the individual to the social relationships of the past. Hope is a condition that binds us to the future. He abandoned his concern for the past and the future to devote himself to the empirical. When he leaves a job, his so-called friends "have a group photo taken and present him with a silver cigarette case, and he leaves to take his new position" (52). No mention is made of Ivan's emotional history with these people; the only concern here is with physical objects. This temporal narrowing is due to the fuzzy sense of social status, disconnected from moral ideas about social relationships and instead preoccupied with the immediate impact of these social relationships. Of these temporal illnesses listed by Morson, Ivan's obsession is closest to the "Isolated Present", where "the present can become so intense that it almost banishes both memory and anticipation" (201). . Unlike the sick people that Morson categorizes – George Mead or even Alexei Ivanovitch in Dostoyevsky's The Gambler – Ivan never thinks to justify his approach. Instead, he seems to have profanity? the belief that the past has no meaning and that the future is not worth thinking about. This laissez-faire attitude toward time is ultimately described as “senseless and disgusting” (120). For most of the novel, the narrator's attitude contrasts sharply with the attitude of Ivan and his comrades. In the first line of the second chapter, the story calls Ivan's life "horrible", an immediate criticismof Ivan's capitulation to sensuality and vanity. The narrator's explicit disagreement with the futility of Ivan's life appears when, shortly after calling Ivan's life horrible, he calls Ivan's father a "superfluous member of various superfluous institutions" (49); This is obviously not a view shared by Ivan's father, nor by Ivan, who followed in his father's footsteps. Throughout Ivan's story, the narrator reminds us of his disagreement with the sensual and vain attitude of the characters; When Ivan is building his beautiful house, the narrator reminds us that: “In reality, it was like the houses of all the people who are not really rich but want to seem rich and so end up looking like themselves. " (66). But the essence of the narrator's attitude lies not in how the narrator disagrees with Ivan's view of life, but rather in what he asserts through the temporally structured open that he creates If we assume that the moment of the narration is located just after Ivan's death, the entire novel, after the first chapter, is a complete analepsis The first moments of the second chapter, where. there are a certain number of prolepsis of different scope, are particularly autonomous temporally Starting from the most accessible analepsis according to which Ivan "died at the age of forty-five", the narrator quickly returns to Ivan's father, to. his superfluous positions already mentioned and to his three sons These far-reaching analepsis allow us to understand the family and childhood from which Ivan comes - force us to see Ivan as emerging from a past. large-scale, and before entering Ivan's adulthood, the narrator offers very short-range analepses, in which he discusses what Ivan became in his later life; “someone strict in carrying out whatever he considers his duty,” as well as more scathing critiques of his “sensuality and vanity” (50). Before entering into an analepsis of intermediate scope - the bulk of Ivan's life - the narrator offers an analepsis on each side, to make the reader aware of where Ivan is coming from and where he is heading. The structure of this second chapter suggests a conception of time different from Ivan's, in which the past and the future matter. The narrator does not allow us to see Ivan as a temporally isolated character, as Ivan himself does. For most of the remainder of the novel, the narrator follows Ivan's life from his young adulthood, and the narrative provides his own past. We see events leading to other events, in a very awkward duration – not the type of duration Bergson would have wanted, but better than seeing the events as entirely isolated. In describing these past and future events, the narrator does not express a deterministic view of time, but he gives a sense of consequence for Ivan's actions, which Ivan himself lacks. Like almost all of the novel's peripheral characters, those in the first chapter - in effect an epilogue to the rest of the story - share Ivan's unhealthy view of time - banishing emotion to focus on vain and immediate concerns. When Ivan's colleagues learn of Ivan's death, Vasilyevich's first response to the news is: "Now I am sure of receiving the post of Shtabel" (36). The word “now” designates the temporal position of these characters’ thoughts. But unlike the rest of the novel, in this first chapter, the narrator shares a sick vision of time. This first appears in the lack of dissent following the comments of Vasilevich and other like-minded men. Throughout the chapter, the narrator does not provideno word of criticism towards these characters. Although the narrator never explicitly states his ideas about time, in the micronarrative the narrator adopts the character's closed view of time, almost never referring to the past or future. . Although he digs into the past for a moment at the beginning of the chapter, when he relates that "Ilyich had been a colleague of the gentlemen assembled here... He had been ill for several weeks" (35), this is in reality not what is said as a preface to understand the vacant position available to other men in the courts. There is also a prolepsis, where the narrator asserts his mastery of time outside of the immediate present, predicting that “Pyotr Ivanovich was not destined to play cards that evening” (40). But this anomalyprolepses (not least because it is false - he ends up playing cards that evening - a curious fact which I will leave alone), only opens a moment immediately after the present - which could be considered as part of the extended present. These brief references to the past and future that the narrator makes serve as important signals that the narrator has the power to refer to times outside of the present, but has decided not to do so. As in Ivan's own life, the abandonment of the past and the future leads to a narrative focus on the empirical and the immediate. The narrator follows Pyotr Ivanovich, and we learn that "Pyotr Ivanovich stepped aside to let the ladies pass and slowly followed them up the stairs", and "Pyotr Ivanovich entered perplexed, as people invariably are, about what was expected of him. ", and sees "an old woman standing motionless", and smells the "faint smell of decomposition" (38-9). The narrator tells us nothing of Piotr's past experience at the funeral, nor of the experience past of any person Piotr encounters Only the immediate empirical facts are given This leads to a shared conception of Ivan in the story and the narrative in strictly present terms: an abandoned post and a corpse. the characters themselves consider Ivan's past - Ivan's wife remembers his suffering - but even these details are given "strictly in terms of their disturbing effect on Praskovia" (45). in a set of empirical data, a stinking corpse with "rigid limbs", a "yellow wax forehead" and a "protruding nose" (39) This dead man, lying in his coffin, becomes the representative figure of the chapter - he. has no past or future (there is a reference to a "church lector", but none of the familiar talk about the deceased going to a better place) - it is a static form. The macronarrative is also complicit in the presentation of an isolated vision of time. Four small scenes are covered in the chapter: the revelation of Ivan's death at the Palace of Justice; Piotr at home with his wife, Piotr at the funeral and Piotr at the card game. These are the events of a completely isolated afternoon and evening. Neither the character nor the narrator refers to any substantial time outside of that afternoon, except for the few references to Ivan's suffering, considered only for their relevance in the present. The only prolepsis already mentioned - the only example where the narrator inserts a time outside the immediate moment of the narration - refers temporally, from the funeral to the game of cards, simply as a reference to another part of the isolated day considered . The chapter thus isolates the reader in a single day, becoming a structural representation of the “Isolated Present”. Almost all of the evidence for the narrator's attitude in this first chapter is negative evidence – which the narrator has not done. But almost as soon as.