Ivan Denisovich Sun
The sun and the moon has long been seen as a dichotomy through many cultures and many people’s eyes. Day and night, hot and cold, the list can continue with different interpretations between individuals. But, in a Gulag labour camp where “a convict’s thoughts are no freer than he is” (40) – a man whose mind is only subjected to the unjust oppression by the Soviet Government – his ideas of what the sun and the moon can mean is significantly repressed to misfortunes that is perpetuated by the camp. In Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the sun and the moon are symbols of three ideas that were derived from the Ivan Denisovich’s experience in the Gulag camp: incarceration and liberty . Although the sun is
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But under the deep crunching snow in the Soviet Union and behind barbed fences that travel across each guard tower, they render prisoners’ thoughts to only look at the sky and anticipate for the long gruesome day ahead of them. The sun symbolizes both the emotional and physical pain that entails with incarceration. As the prisoners wake up to the “pitch black”() sunless sky, they do not anticipate a day of opportunity and expectations that motivate them to live each day. When they wake up, they wonder if they will be “shunted from the workshops they’d been building to a new site, the so-called Sotsgorodok” – a construction site in an extreme weather condition where there is “knee-deep” () snow. Additionally, they work with unfilled amount of food and rest, along with the stress from “thinking about the rate for the job” () so they would not starve for the “next five days” (). The lack of sun in the dark and hopeless morning emphasizes the prisoners’ unmotivated thoughts that derives from the unjust working conditions of a Gulag camp, and it shows the camp’s negative influence and effort to make the prisoners apathetic. Even when the sun is present during the day, it still serves as a symbol of incarceration when the “prisoners are not allowed clocks” () because the “ big boys tell the time for them” () and it forces the prisoners to use the sun as a method to
But under the deep crunching snow in the Soviet Union and behind barbed fences that travel across each guard tower, they render prisoners’ thoughts to only look at the sky and anticipate for the long gruesome day ahead of them. The sun symbolizes both the emotional and physical pain that entails with incarceration. As the prisoners wake up to the “pitch black”() sunless sky, they do not anticipate a day of opportunity and expectations that motivate them to live each day. When they wake up, they wonder if they will be “shunted from the workshops they’d been building to a new site, the so-called Sotsgorodok” – a construction site in an extreme weather condition where there is “knee-deep” () snow. Additionally, they work with unfilled amount of food and rest, along with the stress from “thinking about the rate for the job” () so they would not starve for the “next five days” (). The lack of sun in the dark and hopeless morning emphasizes the prisoners’ unmotivated thoughts that derives from the unjust working conditions of a Gulag camp, and it shows the camp’s negative influence and effort to make the prisoners apathetic. Even when the sun is present during the day, it still serves as a symbol of incarceration when the “prisoners are not allowed clocks” () because the “ big boys tell the time for them” () and it forces the prisoners to use the sun as a method to