To quote Norman Cousins, “Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies within us while we live. Ivan Ilyich discovers at the end of his life that he is surrounded by many false friends and family members, who do not think about his health. The short story written by Leo Tolstoy presents us in a strong and reinforced way the superficiality of bourgeois relations by using the omniscient point of view to describe the respective characters. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an Original EssayOne of the main characters in the short story is Peter. Peter is a bourgeois who studied with Ivan when they were younger, and for Ivan, he was his best friend and a person he trusted and respected greatly during his life, but as a famous quote: “False friends are like shadows. . They follow you in the sun but leave you in the dark.” Peter was not like Ivan thought, Peter was a fake friend who was just interested in his money and status and in Ivan's dark days he was not present. In the first chapter of our short story, we can know how Peter acts while he cares about him. Ivan's death and as if he was preoccupied but he wasn't, he was thinking about what benefits he could get from the event, and this attitude is evident in the opening paragraphs, when he tells his boss Ivan's death. Looking at the previous example, we can see how fake Peter was and he was not a friend people wanted to have. Another example is how selfish he was with Ivan and this shows us more what a good friend is. Don't everyone who is a good friend to you should choose the real ones and Peter is the one we should avoid, because he only thinks about his benefits, like, when Ivan dies, his brother-in-law can take Ivan's work and his wife will then be happy with him. We can perceive this falsity in many fragments. A final sample showing a bit of what Peter did concerns the "sacrifice" he had to make when Ivan died and he doesn't want to attend the funeral because for him it was a waste of time. time to the extent that he didn't really feel bad about Ivan's death. We can see this attitude in the following extract: “After announcing to his wife, at dinner time, the death of Ivan Ilyich and his conjecture that it would be possible to transfer his brother to their circuit, Peter Ivanovitch sacrificed his usual nap, put on his evening clothes and went to Ivan Ilyich.''Looking at all the previous examples, we can deduce that Ivan's life is not really good, because the no one he considered his best friend was fake and selfish. We all know that Ivan was not the perfect person and he makes a lot of mistakes with his family, but we deserve just one person who we trust and the person he loves very much thinks for himself and with this we can perceive that Ivan suffers everything he has done. Another important character in the story is Praskovya Fedorovna, Ivan's wife. Praskovia is a truly essential character to the text, being another example of Ivan's unhappy life because his own wife did not love him and only cared about his money and the fortune she would obtain after his death , like Peter. The other people we will see are his children. His son was a very kind person who cared about his father and stayed with him until he died, but his daughter was not like that, he was ready to get married and because her father got sick she due onsuspend. Ivan was not a current father and husband, he only cared about his work and his own life and because of this selfishness his wife began to hate him more and more and she thought that everything that bad happened in life was because of him, even the simplest things and that's why Praskovya was not sad because of Ivan's death, she was the opposite and for her, when he died, she will be free and she will have all the money he worked for. An example that clearly explains how much Praskovya hates Ivan when he was about to die, she tried to show the doctor that she was really kind and a good wife, she kisses him, but she doesn't has never done this before, so we can see that it's just to show others another reality. The other two characters who help us see the reality of Ivan's life are his son and daughter. His son, Vladmir, is Ivan's youngest brother and we can show that he is really kind to the father who is very sick and suffering from a very difficult illness, so the son is very worried and concerned about the future of his father. This may happen because he is too young to understand things but he was not like other bourgeois and at the end of Ivan's life, Ivan felt sorry for Vladimir and he saw how much his son was important to him and he felt sorry for everything he did wrong. Looking at the last paragraph, we can see a hope in many falsehoods of the bourgeois, we can see that Vasya, Ivan's child is not like the others and he cares about his father's feelings and he expresses his feelings in the text, the feelings of a person who is not like everything around him. To show another reality, without falsity or selfishness and to see that it was not all of Ivan's life that was like that, Gerasim, his servant was not like the other and he was not part of the bourgeoisie , representing a different person among others, salvation. Gerasim is a good guy compared to the others and we see from the beginning of the story that he is different from the others because he is not bourgeois, he is proletarian (middle class) and this kind of people work for the bourgeois and he was better than the others because he was one of the few people who really cared about Ivan's health and how Ivan felt. At the beginning of the text, when Ivan was still a bad person who did not care about others and only about himself and his own work, Gerasim used to do everything to him and Ivan felt better, but when Ivan feels that he will make him die, he started to be a better person and be nice to Gerasim, and then he understands how important he and others are in his life, like in the rest of the last paragraph he said to Gerasim that Gerasim didn't have I no longer need to do everything to him, then Ivan shows Gerasim that he has changed a lot. Gerasim, after all, what Ivan did to him, he was always kind and he was the one who confirmed to Ivan that he was dying. Everyone tried to hide this from Ivan, but Gerasim thinks in Ivan and how this would change him and it was a bad idea to do this, so when he was taking care of Ivan, he told him: He saw that no one felt for him, because no, they even wanted to grasp his position. Only Gerasim recognized him and pitied him. And so Ivan Ilyich felt comfortable only with him. He felt comforted when Gerasim supported his legs (sometimes all night) and refused to go to bed, that's why he mainly told Ivan, being really genuine and honest. To conclude on the difference and importance of Gerasim in Ivan's life, we must consider everything that Gerasim did to him and the fact that.