Composition assignment - I

Composition Assignment - I

I believe the responsibility of Ivan's death lies mostly with himself and partly with his tormentors. What Ivan did was suicidal. Here are some questions that I had in mind: was it really necessary for Ivan  to agree to this challenge? Could Ivan had walked away and not say a word? Why was Ivan so afraid of the cemetery?
I am also going to talk a little bit about the lieutenant. Why did the lieutenant challenge  Ivan? Was the lieutenant scared of the cemetery as well? 

What I do not understand about the story is that there were so many things that Ivan could have done, and yet, he chose to ignore them all. Some of them were: Was Ivan he afraid of the lieutenant and his companions? Did Ivan really need to take the challenge? I am guessing that he was determined to get some sort of money, because he needed it. Ivan did have a chance to say no to this, but he declined it. He was probably also tempted to not let other people mock him even more. 

The lieutenant troubles me. One, how does he know that Ivan does not cross the cemetery to come home. Two, the author does not introduce him. One day he isn't there, the next he is. Since we know that the lieutenant has more power over Ivan, he expresses it in a bad way. He is willingly giving away some of his money, to Ivan, in a challenge. When the lieutenant said that he would see if Ivan did the dare, in the morning, I think that the lieutenant is also afraid of the cemetery as well because he could have said "I will go with you to see if you put my sabre into the ground, and if we come back to the saloon before midnight- five gold rubles to you!". I am not so sure that the lieutenant would even give Ivan five gold rubles:"the lieutenant winked at the others and unbuckled his sabre,". When he said that he winked to the others, he probably didn't actually intend to give five gold rubles to Ivan. Even if Ivan came back to the saloon, they would probably pretend that they don't know what he's talking about or they started laughing at him and ignoring what he was trying to say, by drowning the thought about it by their mockery. 

There are a couple of things that I question regarding his the tormentors- the people who mock Ivan. Why did they pick on him instead of someone else? They probably never experienced living how Ivan did and probably never thought about his situation and how he felt about it.  I guess you can say that they probably respected one another, and they though that Ivan was an outcast and that he didn't belong in there society. The more they mocked Ivan, the more it seemed that Ivan wished to end his life, because of them and under the crucial statements that he needed to live in, in order to survive. This one question seems to be looming in my head -what made Ivan so different from the rest of the town? Its not like he wasn't human or anything like that.

In the end, the message of the story is that we are all responsible for our own fate. If someone pushes us too far,  it is up to us to either confront them or accept it. Most of the time we have a possibility to make choices in our lives and we should use it wisely.