The Last Name Of Ivan Denisovich Essay

1. What is the significance of the title? The title of the book is straightforward and literal. It is all about how Ivan Denisovich Shukhov survives a single day as a prisoner in a Siberian labour camp.

The title clues us into how the story is structured - one day, 24 hours. That’s an apt comparison, since the book follows Ivan Denisovich Shukhov over the course of exactly one day, “from the first clang of the rail to the last clang of the rail.” (Solzhenitsyn 167). The reader can take Ivan Denisovich’s day as a really special and unusual one, but also as a day that is very typical and is a lot like all the other days Ivan has spent in prison. The day is both average and stange, and this combo may be why we’re hearing about it. We also learn our main character’s name from the title, Ivan Denisovich. When you start reading the book, you end up hearing a ton about a man named Shukkov, which is actually Ivan’s last name. In the prison camp, most of the guys refer to each other by their last names, sort of like a nickname. So, since this story is a personal story of Ivan Denisovich Shukkov, the title refers to him by his first name, his actual name, and not any sort of nickname or more distanced form of address

What is the function of the setting? The setting is in the gulag system in the Stalin-run Soviet Union. The gulag prison system is a whole world unto itself, like a hidden universe with its own rules, languages, people, and places. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is consisted primarily of socialist realist literature designed to serve as Communist propaganda, through optimistic and positive depictions of workers’ contentment on collective farms and in government factories. The novel described the abuses of Stalin’s prison camp system through the way Shukkov is abused in the Siberian