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Ivan Denisovich Dehumanization

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“One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, an entrancing book written by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, tells the story of, as the title states, one day in the life of a man serving a ten year sentence in a Russian prison camp, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov. Solzhenitsyn emphasizes the theme of dehumanization in the book and uses this to describe life in a prison camp.
“You’ve only to show a whip to a beaten dog. The frost was severe, but not as severe as the squad leader.” Solzhenitsyn says, describing the moment Tiurin becomes angered at his men for sitting by the fire instead of doing work. He threatens the slackers, and drives them away from the fire. Tiurin is able to do this as squad leader, because the squad hear the threat and believe it. Living …show more content…

Volkovoi calls the prisoners “slobs” and has been known to hit them, for example, and Shukhov is also called a slob, and a pig on page 11 when he washes the floor. On the next page, a guard says that the zeks “are not worth the bread that we give them”. This shows the disrespect the prisoners are submitted to. This kind of mistreatment would have had a psychological effect on both the guards and the men; vocalizing such distaste would strengthen the guards’ low view of the prisoners, and at the same time wear down the zeks into accepting that as their place, after hearing it so many times. This bad treatment strengthens the theme of dehumanization by creating this given belief of the zeks as worthless.
The theme of dehumanization then in general, shows up in many ways throughout the book. Calling the prisoners “beaten dogs”, for example, and referring to them as animals and other subhuman words lowers their assumed status to something less than human. As well as this, the way they are treated by each other and the guards further enforces this idea. The theme of dehumanization in A Day in the Life then is clearly used to emphasize what life was like in a prison

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