One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich Themes

It's no mistake that in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Gang 104 spends most of their day working at an incomplete power station. None of the members of Gang 104 have much power, especially...

In One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Shukhov would kill for Hermione Granger's Time Turner. He could get all his little errands done and not have to run around in a panic all the time. Of cou...

Rules and order are often not really connected in the prison camp, which is odd. There's an excess of rules in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich that no one really follows, like the restrictio...

Let's get some "Eye of the Tiger" going, because nothing says perseverance like Rocky Balboa. Rocky is all about "going the distance." And training montages. But if our zeks in One Day in the Life...

Life in the prison camps is all about survival of the fittest at its most brutal. It's the law of the jungle in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and for the people in the camps, competition...

Morals and principles might seem like an odd thing to discuss in a prison environment. But if you've seen the Shawshank Redemption, you get the gist here. There's good and bad (and principled and u...

The past really seems to fly out the window in the alien world of the prison camp. Everyone is a prisoner now after all, and a prison sentence is a sort of great social equalizer, impacting rich an...

There's a huge genre of prison films and stories – The Shawshank Redemption, Escape from Alcatraz, The Great Escape, Stalag 17, Cool Hand Luke, O Brother Where Art Thou, that Prison Break sho...

Family is turned on its head in the prison camp. All the zeks in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich are separated from their families in the real world, some for decades. In fact, there is so m...