"And Malvolio, strutting and preening and being unctuously coy in yellow stockings and cross garters, is doubly ludicrous to the extent that he is doubly deluded." An example of this is when a dramatic character refers to Malvolio as a woman, implying his "gender and moral distortion."
"But if that is so," he said to himself, "and I am leaving this life with the consciousness that I have lost all that was given me and it is impossible to rectify it—what then?"
An appreciation of Tolstoy's, "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" requires the reader to come to grips with the image of the "ladder", from both a physical and a social/political perspective.
