terms with his impending death, when the pain comes as a signification of the sensory deprivation to which he has subjected his physicality throughout his life. Physically, he experiences a re-exhileration of child-hood experience, perhaps the last time that he allowed himself to experience sensory perception at a pure level, a level unhindered by sociological normalization, categorization or disciplinary action. It is for this reason that throughout the pain, he re-lives the experience of childhood. At this point in his death, Ivan invites the pain as a metaphor for the sensory experience that he has not allowed himself to experience throughout his life. With this experience, he comes to terms with the death, with the movement of life to life, realizing that he cannot be cured, as to be cured would be little more than to continue into the life that has lead him to this pain. He would be perpetuating the existence that he has lead, and with this, he finds peace in the realization of it not being too late, but of finding the ability to experience a re-birth of sorts. Tolstoy transports the reader through these examples of sociological thought with the suffering of his hero. Ivan likely mirrors the thoughts that Tolstoy has in reference to his own life, shunning institutions of society, education and religion. It is in these examples of conformity that the reader sees err, and the justification of that err not to return to a life of perpetual discontentment and conformity, but to move ahead through the pain that Ivan experiences to learn a lesson of accepting freedom, not only on the terms of the freedom itself, but in the burden with which freedom presents itself....
