The Real and the fake in Leo T

"It occurred to him that what had appeared perfectly impossible before, namely that he had not spent his life as he should have done, might after all be true. It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing and all the rest false. And his professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family, and all his social and official interests, might all have been false. He tried to defend all those things to himself and suddenly felt the weakness of what he was defending. There was nothing to defend."

The passage above refers to the books main character, Ivan Ilych. Ilych lived his life based on achieving a very defined set of goals. These goals were set by him, but truly created by the expectations of him. Ilych lived what he considered a fulfilling life, until it was coming to an end. As he is dying, he re-examines his life and realizes that he squandered it on nothing. This realization desolates him, and ultimately allows him to die.

suppressing feelings, emotions, and his conscious in order to achieve the goals he set for himself. By doing so, he blurs reality with fantasy, thinking he has full control over everything, thinking that was is bad is truly good, and things along these lines. He fools himself into thinking that he is happy when he isn't. He lives his life like this through its entirety. As he is dying, he reflects on all that he's done and says, "It is as I had been going downhill while I imagined I was going up. And that is really what it was. I was going up in public opinion, but to the same extent life was ebbing away from me. And now it is all done and there is only death." As he realized his reality was different from true reality, he panics out of sadness and frustration, and begins screaming for three days straight.

Ilych's diluted reality came from his 'ability' to remove his emotions from certain interactions. He would do so in any situation he felt he needed to simplify to the simplest of experiences, or in order to maintain full control over the circumstances. "In his work itself, especially in his examinations, he very soon acquired a method of eliminating all considerations irrelevant to the legal aspect of the case, and reducing even the most complicated case to a form in which it would be presented on paper only in its externals, completely excluding his personal opinion of the matter, while above all observing every prescribed formality." Ilych deals with unpleasant conditions and relationships by

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