Antithesis

Placing opposing ideas or words side by side, so that one illuminates the other through contrast.

In The Death of Ivan Ilyich

the very fact of a close acquaintance's death aroused in everyone who learned of it, as always, a feeling of joy that it was he who had died, and not I.

"He, and not I" sets the dead man against the living in four words. The contrast shows that the relief comes from being the survivor, and that each colleague thinks first of himself.

Chapters I to III: The Wake and Life, the narrator

The past history of Ivan Ilyich's life was the simplest, the most common, and the most terrible.

Chapters I to III: The Wake and Life, the narrator

There was no question of Ivan Ilyich's life; there was a dispute between a floating kidney and an appendix.

Chapters IV to VII: The Illness and the Lie, the narrator

There was light, and now there is darkness. I was here, and now I am going there! Where?

Chapters IV to VII: The Illness and the Lie, Ivan Ilyich

The chief torment of Ivan Ilyich was the lie, that lie somehow accepted by everyone, that he was merely ill, and not dying.

Chapters IV to VII: The Illness and the Lie, the narrator

It was as if I were going down the mountain at a steady pace, imagining that I was climbing. And so it was. In public opinion I was climbing the mountain, and to the same degree life was slipping away beneath me... And now, there it is, he dies!

Chapters VIII to XII: Death, Ivan Ilyich