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It may not seem fair to compare Woody Allen’s play, God with Leo Tolstoy’s short story “The Death of Ivan Ilych.” Whereas Tolstoy has written a highly literary examination of a wasted life from a Christian perspective, God is a farce in which the characters are named after diseases, the play moves haphazardly from Athens to Bensonhurst and back, from the mythic world to the Judeo-Christian, and from the stage into the audience. Yet both these productions are concerned with the same problem: how to deal with the knowledge of our imminent death; but while Allen’s play ends in nihilism, Tolstoy’s story ends in hope.
God opens with two clowns trying to decide how to end the play one of the clowns is writing, and that is how the play closes. The obsessive search for a suitable ending to the play, one that is “in character” and fitting for a “rational animal” (3) leads to a dead-end; however if the universe is not rational the Writer can do anything he wants, but that would mean that life was meaningless and absurd. When they cannot come up with a good idea, they turn to the audience, but there they encounter a new problem: do we see what we see, or do we only imagine it? As the writer says, “they’re watching us in someone else’s play. What if they’re characters in another play? And someone’s watching them? Or what if nothing exists and we’re all in somebody’s dream?” (4) Using Descartes’ paradox the play undermines all certainties, creating only anarchy. Similarly, when Socrates proves to two muggers that evil is just ignorance of the truth, they break his nose, an example of a physical argument overcoming a metaphysical one.
The action speeds up as the play moves forward. Various philosophical problems are presented to the audience but they are interrupted by various temptations, Doris Levine in particular. A machine called deus ex machina is wheeled on stage, but the Writer worries that the presence of God would make a man not responsible for his actions while Doris argues that without God there is no meaning. The Writer finally decides that “I’m a free man and I don’t need God flying in to save my play. I’m a good writer”; then again, he would like to become a literary immortal (14). A demonstration changes everyone’s mind. However, when the king is about to kill the messenger brought him the news that God exists, the deus ex machina malfunctions, and Zeus appears strangled by the lowering wire. A telegram arrives to say God is dead, at which point one character says everything is possible and attacks the nearest woman. At the end of the play, the writer and actor are back to discussing the ending. As Hafliði Sævarsson says, “whether it is the absurdity of the God-machine or Zeus, whether it is the boredom or the sex deprivation among the actors sitting in the hall or whether it is the final desperate cries from the protagonist as he realises he cannot control his fate, they all present the audience with a concept itself has to deal with.” In other words, Allen’s play forces the audience to confront their own lives stripped of all illusion and metaphysics, one in which God is an unknowable factor, at least until after we die.
Tolstoy is also concerned with the questions of whether God exists, the apparent absence of meaning in life, and the absurdity of death. He uses the life of lawyer Ivan Ilych to find the answers because his life had been “most simple, most ordinary and therefore most terrible” (7). Ivan Ilych has long modeled his behavior on his social betters. His youth and early adulthood are lived according to the rules of the class above his: he has a few affairs, drinks, and gambles, but does nothing to excess. He marries because it is considered the thing to do. When marriage interferes with his pleasures he escapes into his work, all the more so when his first child is born. His ambition always is to lead “a decorous life approved of by society” (11) but that life finally becomes unsatisfying mainly because he has done everything in his power to avoid involvement in the lives of others, even those of his children.
Once he becomes ill his life begins to run in reverse. Suddenly he is faced with doctors more powerful than himself, who treat him with the same condescension he has always shown those beneath him. He grows to hate his friend, Schwartz because his “jocularity, vivacity, and savoir-faire …reminded him of what he himself had been ten years ago” (20). As his illness grows worse, he feels “abandoned by everyone” just as he had when he was in desperate need of money. He recollects his childhood, a time before he gave up his values to fit in with society, the only truly happy part of his life. In that way, his illness forces him to examine his life for the first time.
The realization that he is dying separates him from the living. Only his servant, Gerasim brings him comfort because he accepts illness and death as part of nature. Ivan Ilych, faced with the prospect of his death, weeps for the absence of God. It is then that he hears an inner voice ask him what he wants. His answers are repeated as more questions, driving him to wonder if he did not live his life properly. That question nags at him to the point where his mental tortures become far worse than the physical ones. He begins to see that before he can find an answer to any of his questions he must first admit that he has misspent his life, and when that happens he begins screaming and continues to scream for three days. Finally, it is his compassion for his son and his wife that redeems him. He has conquered Death because he can now feel for others. His physical illness, therefore, led to his spiritual recovery. The first section of the story, however, shows that his wife and family have not gained from his experience. They remain locked in their materialistic, self-centered lives and cannot be redeemed until their turn comes to face death.
Angela Fratterola recounts that “before Tolstoy died, he told his daughter, ‘The more a man loves, the more real he becomes.’ This seems to be the overwhelming message of ‘The Death of Ivan Ilych’ also.” Therefore it is hard to compare Woody Allen’s comic anarchy with Leo Tolstoy’s examination of an ordinary life redeemed at the last moment by love. Ivan Ilych, by accepting society’s values rather than spiritual ones, silenced the voice of his soul, which is either the voice of God or his authentic self, while Allen’s characters are denied the authenticity of any kind. They are products of their environment to be recycled in time, their lives beginning and ending as meaninglessly as the play; whereas IvanIlych personifies all humanity in its often misguided struggle toward the light.
Works Cited
Frattarola, Angela, “An Overview of ‘The Death of Ivan Ilych’,” in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 1999. Web.
Sævarsson, Hafliði. “Woody Allen’s God.” Universiteit Utrecht. Web.
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