Antigone meets Ivan Ilyich

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Antigone meets Ivan Ilyich
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Existential Crisis

• Why do we exist? What are we supposed to be
  doing (as individuals, as communities, as a
  species)? Does anything matter?

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Frameworks of/for meaning

• Cosmologies create priorities by telling us what
  is significant and what is insignificant
• Religious systems may provide frameworks of
  meaning for a dying personor they may fail to
  provide frameworks
• Likewise, religious systems may provide
  frameworks of meaning for our actions in life

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Antigone and Ivan IlyichFrameworks for Meaning

• There is a big difference between these two
  characters in this regard.
• Antigone perceives herself her life, her
  actions, and her death related to a
  cosmological framework.
• What of Ivan?

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Scenario One

• Antigone and Ivan Ilyich each come close to
  death, but gain a last-minute reprieve. Ivan is
  miraculously cured after his three-night ordeal
  of screaming pain, and now has decades of life
  before him. Haimon reaches the cave where
  Antigone is entombed before she has killed
  herself, and so she is prevented from completing
  her suicide. Having achieved these remarkable
  (fictional) plot transformations, the question
  now is this - how will these two individuals
  approach life for the remainder of their time?
  How will their religious views shape them? How
  will their spiritual insights shape them?

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Scenario Two

• Imagine that Antigone is Ivan's sister, appalled
  by the callous treatment of her dying relative.
  If they were to have a conversation about
  cosmology on Ivan's death bed, what would be the
  differences in their perspective? What might
  Antigone say to Ivans wife, Praskovya?

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Scenario Three

• Can you imagine them in a role-switch? What if
  Ivan Ilyich had been called upon to stand up for
  some values earlier in his life, as Antigone did
  when it was time to bury her brother? would Ivan
  Ilyich have been more like Ismene or like
  Antigone if faced with such a scenario?
  Would/did Antigone ever descend into an
  existential crisis?

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Scenario Four

• Giving them both the benefit of the doubt, with
  what form of awakened consciousness do Antigone
  and Ivan Ilyich approach death? Describe their
  processes of dying, and how those differ. Do
  they end similarly, in a philosophic sense?

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Scenario Five

• Invent your own way of bringing them together
• Fall 2008 class pondered what would have happened
  if they were married!