This paper examines literary realism through two canonical short works: Gustave Flaubert's "A Simple Heart" and Leo Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich." It analyzes how both authors use mundane, everyday details to construct lives that are simultaneously ordinary and quietly devastating. Through the servant Félicité and the upwardly mobile Ivan Ilyich, the paper explores how realism captures human blindness to the passage of meaningful experience — whether through poverty and loss, as in Flaubert, or through ambition and self-absorption, as in Tolstoy. Together, the two works reveal a shared conviction that the ordinary life, lived without reflection, is the most terrible life of all.
This paper demonstrates comparative textual analysis: two works are placed in dialogue with each other to illuminate a shared theme — literary realism's focus on ordinary, unremarkable lives — while maintaining awareness of the meaningful differences between the two characters' circumstances. The writer identifies both parallel structure (mundane daily existence, gradual suffering, death) and contrasting social contexts (poverty vs. upward mobility) to deepen the comparison.
The paper consists of two tightly organized paragraphs. The first introduces realism through Flaubert's Félicité, cataloguing the ordinary sorrows of her life and arriving at a thesis about the genre's cynical yet honest view of human experience. The second paragraph introduces Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich via a central quotation, traces the arc of his life and death, and extends the realism argument to include the theme of self-imposed blindness to meaningful experience. Both paragraphs build toward the same conclusion from different directions.
Literary realism is a genre defined by its commitment to depicting everyday life with honesty and without idealization. Gustave Flaubert's short story A Simple Heart is a prime example of this tradition. Throughout the story, the character of Félicité performs the mundane, everyday tasks of a servant. Though her life contains important events and truly life-altering moments, they are not unusual — they belong to the normal, life-changing variety. She suffers through a broken heart and several deaths; she loses her health and her hearing; she becomes confused in old age, and eventually she dies.
There is nothing fantastical in Flaubert's tale; Félicité never does anything out of the ordinary. This is the essence of her character and largely comprises the point of the story — she lives her life, which is not particularly happy, but as she is the one living it she does not notice that, and ekes out happiness in her own quietly rendered way. It is a cynical yet realistic view of many human lives.
This same vision is at work in Leo Tolstoy's short story The Death of Ivan Ilyich, when Tolstoy writes, "Ivan Ilyich's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible." Ilyich's life is not nearly as depressing as Félicité's; he has a family and is upwardly mobile, using friendships to maneuver his way into better positions both economically and socially. The details of his life are as mundane as Félicité's, if more lucrative. As he grows more obsessed with his work, he loses touch with his family and with the things that presumably once brought him joy.
He begins to suffer all the more when he learns that he is dying. Death is not easy for him either; he endures a pain in his side for a long time before the end. The reason an ordinary life is considered so terrible is that Ilyich is blind to its ordinariness. Only on his deathbed does he realize the difference between a true life of fulfillment and an artificial life of selfishness and greed.
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