Poor Ivan Ilych is afflicted by not one, but two illnesses. Although his "floating kidney" ends his life, it is a temporal disease - which actually heals as his kidney disease progresses - that ruins his life. Ivan spends his life in a small space of time: he has managed to "put his past aside" (51) and instead spend his life focused on his physical characteristics and social position. In his writings Tolstoy made a great effort to combat this condition, "the prejudice of... [temporal] closure" (8), which he considered pervasive in Russian society. But, interestingly, in addition to the characters in the story having this closed vision, the narrative of the first chapter - and only the first chapter - shares this sick sense of time to the extent that a narrative can be assumed to convey a certain attitude about time . This singularly sick chapter works to engage the reader in the attitude that the book then proceeds to destroy. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Ivan's temporal illness is first acknowledged in the opening line of the second chapter, when the narrator tells us that Ivan's life had been "simple and banal" - and very terrifying" (49). Where lies the horror if not in the simple banal events of Ivan's life? Does it seem to lie in Ivan's approach to life, which the narrator indicts when, in censorious terms, he tells us that Ivan "had succumbed to sensuality and vanity" (50 ). Sensuality suggests much more than an erotic approach to life - and we know from the text that eros was not a driving force in Ivan's life. Instead sensuality indicates a worldview focused on sensual or empirical information rather than on thought or emotions. Ivan's concern with those empirical, and therefore immediate, things involves a temporal narrowing. When Ivan recognizes his temporal illness in the weeks before his death, he understands that what he gave up for his sensuality, was the “friendship and hope” of his younger days (119). Friendship, something he had abandoned, is a condition that binds to the social relationships of the past. Hope is a condition that links to the future. He abandoned his concern for the past and the future in order to devote himself to the empirical. When he quits a job, his so-called friends "have a group photo taken and give him a silver cigarette case, and he sets off to take up his new position" (52). No mention is made of Ivan's emotional history with these people; the only concern here is physical objects. Contributing to this temporal narrowing is the vain sense of social position that is disconnected from moral ideas about social relations and concerned instead with the immediate impact of these social relations. Among the temporal illnesses cataloged by Morson, Ivan's obsession is closest to the "Isolated Present," where "the present can become so intense that it almost banishes both memory and anticipation" (201). Unlike the sick people Morson classifies - George Mead or even Aleksey Ivanovich in Dostoevsky's The Gambler - Ivan never thinks of justifying his approach. Instead it seems to have a blas? faith that the past has no meaning and that the future has little worth thinking about. This laissez-faire attitude towards time is ultimately denounced as "senseless and disgusting" (120). For most of the novel, the narrator's attitude is in stark contrast to the attitude of Ivan and his companions. In the first line of the second chapter, the narrative calls Ivan's life "horrible," an immediate criticismto Ivan's capitulation to sensuality and vanity. The narrator's explicit disagreement with the vanity of Ivan's life emerges when, immediately after calling Ivan's life horrible, he calls Ivan's father a "superfluous member of various superfluous institutions" (49); it is obviously not a view shared by Ivan's father, or by Ivan, who followed in his father's footsteps. Throughout Ivan's story, the narrator reminds us of his disagreement with the sensual and vain attitude of the characters; when Ivan is in the process of building his beautiful house, the narrator reminds us that: "Actually, it was like the houses of all the people who are not really rich but who want to seem rich, and therefore end up looking alike the one to the other" (66). But the essence of the narrator's attitude lies not in how the narrator disagrees with Ivan's vision of life, but rather in what the narrator asserts through the temporally open structure he creates. If we assume that the moment of narration is immediately after Ivan's death, the entire novel, after the first chapter, is a complete analepsis. The first moments of the second chapter, where there are a series of prolepsis of different scope, are particularly temporally autonomous. Beginning with the almost attainable analepsis that Ivan "died at the age of forty-five," the narrator quickly returns to Ivan's father, his already mentioned superfluous positions, and his three sons. This far-reaching analysis allows us to understand the family and childhood from which Ivan emerged – it forces us to see Ivan as emerging from a past. Immediately after this far-reaching analysis, and before entering Ivan's young adulthood, the narrator provides a very brief analepsis, where he discusses what Ivan became in his later life; “one severe in doing whatever he considered his duty,” along with the harshest criticisms of his “sensuality and vanity” (50). Before entering an analepsis of intermediate scope - the bulk of Ivan's life - the narrator provides an analepsis on both sides, to make the reader aware of what Ivan is coming from and what he is heading towards. The structure of this second chapter indicates a conception of time different from that of Ivan, in which the past and the future matter. The narrator does not allow us to see Ivan as a temporally isolated figure, as Ivan himself does. For most of the rest of the novel, the narrator follows Ivan's life into young adulthood, and the narrative provides his own backstory. We see events leading to other events, in a very awkward duration - not the kind of duration Bergson would have wanted, but better than seeing the events as completely isolated. In providing these past and future events the narrator does not express a deterministic view of time, but provides a sense of consequence for Ivan's actions, which Ivan himself lacks. Like almost all of the novel's peripheral characters, those in the first chapter - actually an epilogue to the rest of the story - share Ivan's sick view of time, banishing emotions to focus on vain and immediate concerns. When Ivan's colleagues learn of Ivan's death, Vasilyevich's first response to the news is: "Now I am sure that I will receive the post of Shtabel" (36). The word "now" indicates the temporal location of these characters' thoughts. But unlike the rest of the novel, in this first chapter the narrator shares the sick vision of time. This is first evident through the lack of dissent in the wake of comments from Vasilevich and other like-minded men. In the entire chapter the narrator does not provide a word of criticism of these characters. Although the narrator never explicitly states theown ideas about time, in the micronarrative the narrator adopts the character's closed vision of time, almost never referring to the past or the future. . Although at the beginning of the chapter he delves into the past for a moment, when he says that "Ilyich had been a colleague of the gentlemen gathered here... He had been ill for some weeks" (35), this is actually only said as a preface to understand the vacancy that is open for other men in the courts. There is also a prolepsis, in which the narrator states his understanding of time outside the immediate present, predicting that "Pyotr Ivanovich was not destined to play cards that evening" (40). But this is anomalous prolepsis (also because it is wrong - that night he ends up playing cards - a curious fact which I will leave alone), it opens only in a moment immediately following the present one - which could be considered part of the prolonged present. These brief references to the past and future that the narrator makes serve as important signals that the narrator has the power to refer to moments outside of the present, but has chosen not to. As in Ivan's life, the abandonment of the past and the future leads to a narrative focus on the empirical and immediate. The narrator follows Pyotr Ivanovich, and we learn that “Pyotr Ivanovich stepped aside to let the women pass and followed them slowly up the stairs,” and “Pyotr Ivanovich entered bewildered, as people invariably are, on that what he was expected to do there,” and sees “an old woman standing still,” and smells the “slight odor of decay” (38-9). The narrator tells us nothing about Pyotr's past experience at funerals, or the past experience of anyone Pyotr meets. Only the immediate empirical facts are provided. This leads to a shared conception of Ivan in the narrative and in the story in strictly current terms: an abandoned post and a dead corpse. There are a few isolated moments when the characters themselves consider Ivan's past – Ivan's wife recalls his suffering – but even these details are given "strictly in terms of their unnerving effect on Praskovya" (45). As a result, Ivan transforms into a lump of empirical data, a smelly corpse with "stiff limbs," "yellow waxy forehead," and "protruding nose" (39). This dead man, lying in his coffin, becomes the representative figure of the chapter: he has neither past nor future (there is reference to a "church reader", but none of the familiar talk about the deceased going to a better place) - it is a static form. The macronarrative is also complicit in presenting an isolated vision of time. Four small scenes are covered in the chapter: the revelation of Ivan's death in court; Pyotr at home with his wife, Pyotr at the funeral and Pyotr at the card game. These are the events of a completely isolated afternoon and evening. Neither the character nor the narrator refers to any substantial moment outside of this afternoon, except the few references to Ivan's suffering, considered only for their relevance to the present. The individual prolepsis already mentioned - the only example in which the narrator inserts a time outside the immediate moment of the narration - temporally refer, from the funeral to the card game, a mere reference to another part of the isolated day taken into consideration. The chapter thus isolates the reader in a single day, becoming a structural representation of the "Isolated Present." Almost all of the evidence for the narrator's attitude in this first chapter is negative evidence: what the narrator did not do. But as soon as the narrator uses the word "horrible" at the beginning of the second chapter, the narrator's closed attitude in the first chapter becomes visible by contrast. The congruence between the narrative and the.