One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich Essay

Settings are often constructed to expose suffering and injustice. Discuss with reference to "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich"

The novel, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" illustrates the horrors of life in Russia under the Joseph Stalin. The novel portrays the repression of human rights at that time and it also shows the importance of freedom. "Freedom is found only when a person has been stripped of everything". This is true because during Stalinist Russia, people were stripped of their simplest human rights, such as freedom and family. Under the rule of Joseph Stalin, prison camps for criminals or political dissidents were built in barren lands in Siberia and run by secret police. These Stalinist labor camps were used to industrialize the Soviet Union in a short period of time. Without these camps Stalin would have never been able to industrialize the Soviet Union. Most of the political prisoners were innocent Soviet citizens, who were accused of being spies, terrorists, Rightists, nationalists and anarchists. The prisoners were assigned very hard labor such as construction work, which was the most common form of labor. Solzhenitsyn chose the
setting to take place in the prison camp in Siberia in order to show the intolerable suffering that the inmates endured. "Only those can understand us who ate from the same bowl with us." The setting of the novel contributes to a great extent in conveying the suffering and injustice that the prisoners in the labor camps went through during their daily lives. The plot portrays a day in the life of an inmate named Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, who is the protagonist of the novel, and what he must do to survive in the labor camp which he is imprisoned in. The events of the novel take place in different parts of the prison camp such as the mess hall, the sleeping quarters, the sickbay, the "hole", and the work site. Solzhenitsyn used all these places in order to show the suffering of the inmates. For example, the prisoners woke up in crammed sleeping quarters where they slept on very uncomfortable bunk beds, where they were freezing to death because they did not have enough clothing to keep them warm. "He (Ivan Denisovich) lay on top of a four man bunk, with his blanket and jacket over his head, and both feet squeezed into one turned in sleeve of his jerkin." The sleeping quarters is a setting which is used to show the suffering of the inmates during their sleep. Another building that exposes the suffering of the inmates is the mess hall. The mess hall is where the prisoners eat their daily meals. It is a very unpleasant place as it is very crowded, very dirty, and quite cold and the food is atrocious. "They sat in the cold mess hall, most of them eating with their hats on, eating slowly, picking out putrid little fish from under leaves of boiled black cabbage and spitting the bones out on the table." The mess hall was a setting where the author described the suffering of the prisoners through the disgusting food they were forced to eat and the very small portions they were offered. The mess hall is a symbol of human suffering due to the fact that the zeks were offered small portions of rotten food in a time and place where they needed healthy food to provide them with enough energy needed for the hard labor they were performing every day. Alexander Solzhenitsyn used other buildings to represent the prisoners suffering and these included the sickbay and the hole. The sickbay was a place where the prisoners were to go to at a time when they were feeling ill. However, the sickbay only allowed two prisoners to be ill in one day. If more prisoners were injured or sick they had to cope with their suffering and go to work. "In the morning he had the right to exempt from work two men only."
The building that is used to portray human suffering and injustice to its extreme measures is the "hole".
The "hole" is the fear of all prisoners. It was the punishment block at the labor camp. The prisoners were sent there for various reasons such as getting out of bed a minute too late. The hole meant death to the prisoners because if you spent more than fifteen days in there you were dead. "Ten days in that cell-block if they were strict about it and made you sit out the whole stint meant your health was ruined for life. It meant tuberculosis and the rest of your days in hospital. Fifteen days in there and you'd be six feet under." The extremely inhumane conditions of the "hole" which were worse than normal living conditions on the camp, emphasize that the hole exposed human suffering on the
camp. Outside the building of the camp, the weather is the setting that conveys human suffering and injustice. The Siberian winter is infamous for being harsh with temperatures that dropped below forty degrees. The prisoners were forced to walk through this weather to their work sites. The cold was considered torture by the prisoners. Wearing ratty prison clothes in the biting Siberian winter made constant suffering a part of the prison sentence for the inmates. "The cold stung. A murky fog wrapped itself around Shukhov and made him cough painfully. The temperature out there was -17 degrees; Shukhov's temperature was +99. The fight was on." Solzhenitsyn's constant emphasis on the cold reminds us that Shukhov is not only a political prisoner but a prisoner of nature as well. At the work site, which is outdoors, the prisoners have to protect themselves from the cold and do whatever is in their ability to survive the weather. Ivan and his mates had to build a power station outside where it was not heated and so they built a stove to keep them warm. "If they didn't warm the place up in the next two hours, they'd all be done for, every last man." The weather was one of the biggest enemies of all the prisoners and they suffered greatly because of it. In conclusion, the setting of the novel, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" exposes great human suffering and injustice. The different buildings, rooms or halls that the prisoners spent most of their time in were used by the author in order to help him convey the suffering in the camp. As well as that the living conditions such as the intolerable weather and atrocious meals were also used by Solzhenitsyn to portray the suffering of the inmates. The prisoners had to work in freezing temperatures, spend their punishments in a prison cell that meant death or severe illness, eat rotten meals day after day and despite all that they were able to survive. This can be seen through the last sentence in the novel. "A day without a dark cloud. Almost a happy day."