The Plato answer is:
The painting The Scream portrays a person in great anguish. One central interpretation of the artwork is that it represents life in the modern age. The anguish is caused by a modern life of deception and superficiality. The painting also portrays the artist’s own personal experience. Just as The Death of Ivan Ilyich reflects Tolstoy’s inner spiritual crisis, The Scream expresses Edvard Munch’s inner despair. Munch experienced the same spiritual crisis that Ivan Ilyich faces and wanted to portray that in his painting. In The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Ivan comes to the following realization about the false nature of his superficial life:
“…This is wrong, it is not as it should be. All you have lived for and still live for is falsehood and deception, hiding life and death from you." And as soon as he admitted that thought, his hatred and his agonizing physical suffering again sprang up, and with that suffering a consciousness of the unavoidable, approaching end. And to this was added a new sensation of grinding shooting pain and a feeling of suffocation.
At this point, Ivan Ilyich reaches the fourth stage of grief, depression. Edvard Munch also suffered from depression, which is evident in the eerie colors and distorted face of the screamer in his painting. Ivan Ilyich falls into a terrible depression and screams continuously for three days because he is now past the stage of hope and bargaining. However, he has not yet entered the final stage, acceptance:
For three whole days, during which time did not exist for him, he struggled in that black sack into which he was being thrust by an invisible, resistless force. He struggled as a man condemned to death struggles in the hands of the executioner, knowing that he cannot save himself. And every moment he felt that despite all his efforts he was drawing nearer and nearer to what terrified him. He felt that his agony was due to his being thrust into that black hole and still more to his not being able to get right into it. He was hindered from getting into it by his conviction that his life had been a good one. That very justification of his life held him fast and prevented his moving forward, and it caused him most torment of all.
Tolstoy chooses to focus on the last three days because they describe Ivan Ilyich slipping into total despair (fourth stage of grief) and then moving toward acceptance (fifth stage). In this final stage, he accepts that he has lived a life based on false values.
This change within Ivan Ilyich identifies him as the novella’s hero-like protagonist. Although he starts out as a shallow character, he eventually shows moral courage by facing up to the reality of his condition:
And suddenly it grew clear to him that what had been oppressing him and would not leave him was all dropping away at once from two sides, from ten sides, and from all sides. He was sorry for them, he must act so as not to hurt them: release them and free himself from these sufferings. “How good and how simple!” he thought. “And the pain?” he asked himself. “What has become of it? Where are you, pain?”
This act shows his enlightenment and newfound sense of compassion. Ivan Ilyich has become more like the heroic Gerasim, who Tolstoy portrays as living an authentic life.
