The novella begins with the wake because the book does not ask whether Ivan Ilyich will die, but what death reveals about his life; by showing the coffin first, Tolstoy removes the suspense of the ending and sets the reader to watch the path.
The first chapter does something else as well: it shows the living handling death with the same decorum the dead man showed in life. The colleagues think of promotions; the narrator says that the death of an acquaintance awakens in everyone, as always, the joy that it was he who died and not I; Pyotr Ivanovich crosses himself, because it never does any harm; the widow consults about the pension, and the game of vint is not called off. By generalizing, the narrator places the reader in the group of colleagues.
After the wake comes the biography, and it changes weight. When chapter II opens by saying that Ivan Ilyich's life was the simplest, the most ordinary, and the most terrible, the reader already knows how it ends and sees the character choose each step while feeling he is getting it right. The fall from the ladder in chapter III, told without emphasis, comes to be read as the beginning of the end.
The frame also gives Gerasim, the only one who speaks of death without evasion, the first scene, and it prepares the change of sides in the lie: at the wake it is the living who pretend before the dead man; from the illness onward it is the household that lies to the dying man.