Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych is a work that expresses outlooks on life and death. One of the views of life that Tolstoy has is that what some people hold to be important is not necessarily important at all. The story follows the thoughts of Ivan Ilych as he comes closer to his death, how his thoughts stray from justifying his life's work to understanding that he has led his life astray. .
"Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible."(para55) This statement means that because Ivan always did what a man of his position should do everything in his life was there because it was expected of him he got a good job, so he took a wife like a young gentleman ought to, he bought a nice house and furnished it with antiques and other nice furniture because a man should have a symbol of his wealth. Everything he did was expected of him so much that his life was too simple and too ordinary. There is nothing that is really his own in his life, everything he enjoys are things that he is expected to enjoy. As he gets closer to the end of his life he realizes all things he took pleasure in were void of meaning. Such as his bridge games Ivan gets a chance to get a grand slam the greatest hand in all of bridge he botches the execution of the hand but comes to realize what difference would it have made if he did get the grand slam. .
At the start of the story Ivan feels no sympathy for others not for his wife when she is ill while pregnant or for the cases he goes through at work. He is disassociated and formal with all of them. When his wife is ill, she becomes irritable and quarrelsome and instead of being with her and trying to comfort her, he withdraws from her and buries himself in his work. While at work he removes all emotion, breaking each case down to very specific terms that are remove him from each case. However this leads him to be a good lawyer and is part of the reason he gets his first promotion out of law school.