Ivan Denisovich

It is a little known fact around the grueling halls of any American high school that the worst assignment you will ever be forced to endure will be reading Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. You may disagree, to which I will cordially mock you and question your sanity. All I remember about the book is a crazy broad with a cake covered in cobwebs. It is essentially an epic- epically painful to read. At any rate, after that long 9 weeks of analyzing, dissecting, and excavating every facet of this horrific and abominable experience, I prayed that nothing like it would ever have to graze my path ever again. And being a man who believes in prayers, I was sincerely let down to learn that my prayer was not answered.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is by far the worst thing I've ever been forced to read. It is not only drab and monotonous rubbish, it is unfortunately self explanatory. It centers around a man named Ivan, who turns out to be less interesting than learning the original key of parlay-pro in the legal system. This poor deadbeat is locked away in an equally boring prison somewhere in the mountains of Russia. His daily dilemmas include finding out what happened to all the rice, wondering why it's so cold, bugging people about the rice, freezing his butt off at work, complaining that he is hungry for rice, etc.

The author, one revered Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, was banished from Russia and housed and protected by America. He thought it was because his book was so uproarious and rebellious when it came to the overthrow of communism. I think it is because his book was so bad, the Russians couldn't stand to claim him as his own and Americans don't read in general, so we had no problem with him. The only good thing about this wretched book is that it is smaller than Great Expectations. Beyond that, it is worthless to me.

In keeping with the tradition of my blog, I often wrap things up with a clever quip or moral that hopefully challenges the comfort of the way we do things and beckons us to become better individuals all around. Today, I shall void this tradition and simply start by warning you to never read this epic failure. It will be the worst decision of your life, in my opinion. If I must conclude this with a point, then I shall.

Our lives are boring. When read in 3rd period English class, life is utterly and completely boring and pointless. At this moment, I am dreading going to English and listen to another dissertation on the epic struggle of the Russian people under the reign of the USSR in this bloody Siberian camp. Yet this book, to some boring person out there, means something. It apparently had an impact with someone somewhere to care enough to publish it. Maybe they just like watching seniors in high school suffer, but maybe they had a wild hair and actually enjoyed this story. It is hard to believe, but it is unfortunately, most likely, true.

No matter how boring or pointless you see your life, it is still important to someone. It is extremely pivotal to somebody out there. So you may feel down and out, feel utterly useless and distraught about how uneventful or distasteful your life may be, but I guarantee you it is untrue for two reasons: 1) Nobody's life is as drab and mind numbing as this guy and 2) people are watching you, and yearning to be a product of your actions. Some may want to be like you; some may want to be unlike you. Only you can decide which way to live your life. You may feel like you are held in some prison or annex that seemingly dictates your life, whether it be work, school, fear, or whatever else troubles us these days. But you are no more a prisoner of these things than you want to be a prisoner of these things, and in Christ, all things are made new and there is freedom. The important thing to remember is that we are all being observed by somebody out there. So decide how you wish to live, free or imprisoned. Decide what you want people to see when they look at your life and see what you are all about.

Me, personally, I want to be unlike this Ivan fellow. He sucks. So take it from a guy who still has a fourth of the book left to read- live life exemplary of Christ and exemplary of life itself. Here's to learning how to live and learning that 1940's literature from Russia by a depressing Russian is never fun.

KB