The Death of Ivan Ilyich is about what death reveals of the life that came before it: a judge who lived as well-placed people considered correct discovers, while ill, that this life protects him from nothing and perhaps was never really a life.
The book does not ask whether Ivan Ilyich will die, because the first chapter already shows him in the coffin. It asks what the correct life has to do with death, and it answers slowly, in the order it narrates: first the living who treat death with decorum, then the biography, then the illness.
Five themes sustain the novella. Death, which the colleagues keep at a distance with the idea that it happened to him and not to them. Truth and lie: the general lie that he is only ill torments him more than the pain, and only Gerasim does not lie. Appearance and reality: the house that seems unique to him is the same as that of everyone who wants to look rich. The meaning of life: the voice of the soul asks him whether he lived well, and he answers with the yardstick that is itself on trial. And compassion: he wants to be consoled like a sick child, and he is freed only when he feels pity for his son and wife.
That is why it is a short novella that is read as a question rather than as a plot: each chapter strips away one of Ivan Ilyich's defenses (the work, the house, the card game, the logic, the family, the rite) until only the one that holds him at the end remains.