to which Ivan conforms to this process. Through the normalization of Ivans life, he finds placidity, boredom and self-indignation in his actions as prescribed by the discourse. The normalization of his existence acts as the benign factor that leads to his pain and suffering throughout his illness. Contextually, this normalization process is what leads us to our opening quotation from the work. In this quotation, Ivan comes to the realization as to the placid and benign nature that his life took as a result of this conformity and normalization, the turns that his life took as a need to fit into the sociological norms and discourse set before him in his studies. In this most powerful and revealing of passages, Tolstoy uses metaphorically the figure of the highly placed people as a signification of disciplinary function. He uses the family, as a realization of what he wishes his family and life could have been, the joy inherent in the imagery of the child. His professional duties having amounted to little personal success, as well as his ultimate demise are portrayed as unnecessary and having been carried out without cause. It is at this point in The Death of Ivan Ilyich that he realizes his end is near, that his life is the cause of that death, and that his permittance of this extra-discursive disciplinary force was, in hindsight, the true means to his end as an individual. One of the defining moments of his death comes just after this realization, with the arrival of his wife and her request that he take a sacrament, to which, he agrees to some extent. However, with taking the sacrament, and gaining once again a false hope of being cured, comes the pain that had washed over him to this point. Here, the reader sees Ivan revert back to the demands of his prior constraints, entering yet another disciplinary force into the plot we with that of the accepted orthodox practice of last rights. This action falls in a time when Ivan is finally at...
