- Is the book’s structure chronological or does it move back and forth between past and present? Does the author use a single (first or third person) viewpoint or shifting points of view? Why might the author have chosen to tell the story this way and how does it influence the reader’s understanding?
The book One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich tells the story of a man in chronological order. The book explains one day in the life of a man living in a Gulag labor camp. The book is in the third person point of view switching from the main character to minor characters. The book is a single day long which means it would be very repetitive if we saw the same point of view from one person for the entire book. The author choose different characters for the narrator to dictate so that we have multiple views through out the one day. I found the book rather entertaining while others found it very slow and repetitive. I read really fast so when I read the book, the day goes a lot quicker. On page 51 of the book the men start their labor which goes until page 106 they stop working. Throughout this period the narrator talks through shukov, Senka, Tiurin, and many more. This enriches the plot and helps the story become more interesting.
The author chose to make the book like this because he wants to make the reading experience richer. Without it the book would be a lot plainer. If the book was written in first person the book would be a lot more descriptive but it wouldn't show how the Gulag camps functioned and worked and what the prisoners saw, which is what the author wants. The author of the book, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, was in Gulag camps for long periods of times. When he made this book, it was the first book ever created talking openly about the Gulags in Russia and the Stalin Repression in general.
Sources:
"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 08 Mar. 2015.
"Joseph Stalin." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 22 Feb. 2015.
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