Compare and Contrast between Leo Tolstoy and Kafka
... In Leo Tolstoy’s “Death of Ivan Iliych”, the main character Ivan becomes ill and ultimately dies. ... He was “attracted to people of high station as a fly is drawn too the light, assimilation their ways” (Tolstoy 1190) and attempted to exude the affluent ways of life. ... He married because Proskovya “came from a good family” (Tolstoy 1192) but when he was faced with the reality of a wife and new baby, he chose to act the same way he did at work, by putting everything on paper, to “ entrench himself against such infringement” (Tolstoy 1189) Ivan’s illness came about from a fall he sustained to his lung while decorating his new home with “cheaply antiques”(Tolstoy 1196), all to give an air of aristocracy he so greatly desired. ... ”(Tolstoy 1219) Amid Ivan’s pain and self-pitying he crossed from the camel “in the loneliest dessert…the second metamorphoses occurs; here the spirit becomes a lion” (Nietzsche 26).