Vivian Bearing Ivan Ilych Analysis

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Most everyone has regrets when they die, whether they are moral or physical. Some regrets are minor, but there are also larger regrets that make us truly wonder about the type of life we lived. Vivian Bearing and Ivan Ilych both experience regrets as they face death, Ivan regrets the way he lived his life and Vivian regrets how unkind she was to others.
One primary regret that Ivan encounters as he nears death is that he did not live life on his own terms. Throughout his whole life Ivan lived by what he believed society deemed correct. When Ivan married his wife he “married for [two] reasons: in acquiring such a wife he did something that gave him pleasure and, at the same time, did that people of the highest standing considered correct” …show more content…

Flashbacks to her teaching help us see how she treated the people around her, especially her students, harshly. In a flashback she realizes how mean she had been to her students. Talking about how she will not tolerate students being unprepared for class, she then says to herself, “Did I say: You are 19 years old. You are so young. You don’t know a sonnet from a steak sandwich” (Wit). At this point Vivian’s regret of not being kinder to others becomes prominent because she questions why she was so callous to her students. When asked by a student for an extension on his paper because his grandmother died, Vivian replied with “Do what you will, but the paper is due when it is due” (Wit). Looking back on this Vivian regrets the way she treated the boy because she again sees the expression on his face and tries to come up with a word to describe what she feels, but fails to do so. By looking at her reaction we can only assume that she feels remorse and possibly loneliness because soon after this she calls in her nurse, Suzie, to talk with about what she is feeling. From Vivian we can learn that being kind to the people we encounter may help us not feel so alone in the end. On her deathbed, Vivian only had one person who truly cared about her and that was Suzie. If Vivian had been a little more lenient and kind towards her students she may not have only had one person who was there for her. In her time of

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