What It Is
The black bag, narrow and deep, into which Ivan Ilyich Golovin feels himself pushed, with pain, in the stupor of the opium in chapter IX, and in which he struggles during the three days of screaming in chapter XII, until he falls through it and finds, at the bottom, something that shines. In chapter XII the text also calls it a black hole (черная дыра). The Russian says черный мешок (black bag, our translation).
Where It Appears
In chapter IX, after his wife comes back from the theater and gives him the opium, until three in the morning he lies in a painful stupor in which it seems he is being shoved into a narrow, deep black bag, ever further in, without managing to get through. He is afraid, and at the same time wants to fall; he struggles and helps. Suddenly he lets go, falls and wakes, with the legs of Gerasim on his shoulders (Gerasim's Legs on His Shoulders). That same night the voice of his soul asks him the question he pushes away:
«Может быть, я жил не так, как должно?» — приходило ему вдруг в голову. «Но как же не так, когда я делал все как следует?», Perhaps I have not lived as I ought to have? it would come to him suddenly. But how not, when I did everything as it should be done? he told himself.
In chapter X the bag does not appear, but the image that replaces it has the same direction, the stone falling ever faster into the dark:
Одна точка светлая там, назади, в начале жизни, а потом все чернее и чернее и все быстрее и быстрее., One bright point there, behind, at the beginning of life, and then everything blacker and blacker and faster and faster.
In chapter XII, during the three days in which for him there is no time, he struggles in the black bag into which an invisible force pushes him, like a condemned man in the hands of the executioner. The narrator says why he does not get through:
Пролезть же ему мешает признанье того, что жизнь его была хорошая., What keeps him from getting through is the recognition that his life had been good.
A force pushes him in the chest and side, he falls into the hole, and down there something shines (The Light). It is like a train, when you think you are moving forward and are actually moving backward, and suddenly you realize the true direction.
What It Means
The bag is the passage of death seen by one who resists it. The torment, says chapter XII, lies in being pushed and, even more, in not being able to get through, and what prevents it is the conviction that his life was good. The defense that in chapters IX, X and XI kept doubt away becomes, in the last, the obstacle itself.
The bag appears for the first time on the night he refuses to admit he lived wrongly, in chapter IX, and it opens at the moment he admits it, in chapter XII: everything was "not that," but "that" can still be done. The image has two sides that the text keeps together. Read as death, it is narrow, dark and painful, and he fears it. Read as birth, it is the channel he must pass through, and the very chapter IX says he wants to fall and helps, even as he struggles. The book does not choose, but what lies on the other side is light, and not nothing.
Relationships
- Standard themes: Death, Meaning of Life.
- Themes of the work: Death, Meaning of Life.
- Characters: Ivan Ilyich Golovin, Gerasim.
- Neighboring symbols: the light, what shines at the bottom of the bag; the fall and the curtain, because the passage is his second fall; Gerasim's legs on his shoulders, the position in which he wakes from the first dream.