Final Post Owain (Summative)

How did historical events influence the ideas in the novel?  What cultural issues may have influenced, challenged, or inspired the author?

In the story One Day in The Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the author demonstrates one day of Ivan Denisovich when he was in a boot camp near the russian border. In One Day of The Life of Ivan Denisovich the author reveals the hidden reality of the russian boot camps.

The historical events influence the ideas in the novel because if this novel wasn’t sent out then people today and then wouldn’t have known what was happening to the prisoners and where they were being sent. The book showed us where the prisoners went and what happened to them inside of camp, how they were treated, and how much they worked each day. The author was also inspired from the life of a prisoner. I think the author was on the side of the prisoner because he didn’t like what happened in the life of a prisoners in the boot camps. So in his spare time he started to write secretly about one day of a prisoner's life in a boot camp in Russia. In 1970 he received a Nobel Prize for literature and four years later the Soviet Union revoked his citizenship and he was deported. Finally I think that the author wanted to reveal the truth to what really happened in the russian boot camps. The truth was that the boot camps treated the prisoners as if they were slaves. The prisoners had to wake up at six and if they stayed in bed a little bit over time then they would be punished. The prisoners worked hard everyday for twelve hours. Went to work at 6:30 a.m and came back from work at 6:30 p.m. The prisoners got little amounts of food and one piece of bread everyday and when it was cold the guards got to stay by the fire, while the prisoners were freezing in their cells. That was the truth of the russian boot camps. In conclusion the author wanted to show the real Russia to the world, not the  fake. The author wanted to show us what was really happening in Russian boot camps, how the prisoners there were treated badly, almost the same way as slaves. In One Day of The Life of Ivan Denisovich the author proves the reality of the russian boot camps.

Describe a choice made by a character in the novel.  Why did the character make this choice?  Was his or her action justified?

In the story One Day in The Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the author tells a lot about Ivan Denisovich. The author describes and explains why Ivan Denisovich made the choices he made. In One Day in The Life of Ivan Denisovich the author shows what kinds of decisions Ivan made and how they affected his life in the boot camp.

One choice the character made was just focus on work. He chose to focus on work because if he thought about something like food, he would start to get hungry.And that was a problem because they worked for a very long time each day. They worked for about 12 hours a day. And if they thought about food while in work then they would not focus right during the whole day of work. Like Ivan, he never thought about food until the end of his work because he thought at the end of the day that the food was the prize, but in order to get that food you needed to work hard, cooperate, and get the job done.The character also made the choice to eat his food slowly. He decided to eat his food because it made him feel full. But not only just because of that reason but because when he is really hungry and eats his food quickly he doesn’t like it because he doesn’t feel full and he is still hungry. Most of the prisoners eat their food quickly and still want more because they only get a full meal once a day at dinner, the rest of the day they have a piece of bread. And that is not a lot of food, one meal and a slice of bread each day for 24 hours, when they work hard each day for 12 hours. Another choice the character decided to make was to be happy what he had. He decided to be happy because he didn’t like anything about the boot camp, but at the end of the book the character likes what things he has. The bread, the food, bed, and his friends in the 104th group. There is not a lot of things that make you happy in a boot camp, and when they are things that make you happy in the boot camp. Its hard to identify them. The prisoners all hate the boot camp because there is nothing they like about their stay at the boot camp. Even Ivan hated the boot camp in the beginning of the book, and at the end of the book Ivan was happy. He was happy because he recognized the good things that make you happy in the boot camp. And those thing were the food, friends, bed, and the countdown to release date. In conclusion Ivan made choices because he thought that food was the prize the end of the day, and eating his food slowly made him more full because he thought it lasted longer, and finally enjoying what he had. Here the author wanted to show us what Ivan had decided to do to enjoy his day and enjoy what he had because that is all the prisoners get. In One Day of The Life of Ivan Denisovich the author shows us what the prisoners have and choose to do.