Chekhov express the author's vision of death as a prismatic focal point of the human condition. Through dialogue, narrative commentary, and subtextual connections, Chekhov's stories examine death from so many angles that it becomes impossible to give the theme a single meaning. The multiple interpretations of the protagonists' death in The Grasshopper and Gusev instead mean that death can be implicated in social injustice, personal transcendence, or existential insignificance, depending on the opinion of the one judging death. This implies that people and their ideologies may attribute importance to death, but that it has no intrinsic ethical value. In The Grasshopper, Dymov's death is examined from two social and moral perspectives, both defined by the narrative as highly individualized points of view. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned"?Get the original essayFirst, because Dymov died following a risky medical procedure, his colleague Korostelev concludes that "he served science and died for the cause of science.” (89). Here, Chekhov clearly introduces, in a character's voice, an opinion about what this specific death might mean. In Korostelev's dialogue we discover the prospect that a person can die as a sacrifice for the sake of others. But this view is complicated by evidence of the speaker's bias. The reader only has Korostelev's words to support “death for progress”; interpretation, and it is clear that this interpretation is a way for the character to deal with the death of his friend, rather than an authorial comment on death in general. This is evident in the way Korostelev's judgment is delivered: "'and what moral force!' he continued, getting more and more angry with someone” (89). The third-person narrator, with an impartial voice, draws particular attention to Korostelev's personal indignation as the driving force behind his view of Dymov's loss as morally significant. The reader is thus introduced to the possibility of death as a moral or progressive function, but because this vision is drawn from one man's emotional experience, Chekhov does not position it as a universal value of death. The social implications of Dymov's death are interpreted in a completely different light by his wife, Olga Ivanovna. It takes his death and the subsequent memory of their life together for Olga to realize that Dymov's contemporaries “had all seen in him a future celebrity” (89). Olga Ivanovna, obsessed with fame and prestige, interprets her husband's disappearance as a revelation of her social stature. According to Olga, fame, rather than progress or moral leadership, is the most important thing that results from death. As in the case of Korostelev, this interpretation is textually linked more to the emotional state of the character than to the general phenomenon of death. After her epiphany, the story zooms in on Olga's subjective vision of the room where Dymov's deathbed is located: "The walls, the ceiling, the lamp and the carpet on the floor winked mockingly at him, as if trying to say: 'you missed your chance!' » (89). The narrative mode's shift from passive description ("she realized") to perspectival focus shows that Dymov's death is socially relevant only to Olga and her desire to recognize and associate with famous people. Just as no one else in history anthropomorphizes the death chamber in this way, no one else sees the disappearance ofDymov as the rise of a previously unknown celebrity. Now that the reader has seen two highly personalized interpretations of death, he or she might suspect that these interpretations say more about the observers of the act than about the act of dying itself. In death, Dymov no longer has any action or identity, so it remains for his widow and his colleague to project theirs onto him. This is supported by the third-person omniscient narrator's neutral vision of the deceased. Chekhov writes that “only his forehead, his black eyebrows and his familiar smile showed that it was Dymov” (89). Earlier in the story, these traits were commented on as signifiers of the portraiture beauty that Olga projected onto her husband, but now they are used to say that, in death, only objective physical characteristics constitute an identity. The deceased Dymov has no character of his own, so it follows that any values ​​attributed to his passing are inspired by external perspectives and not the physical reality of his death. Regarding his lack of action, it is said that his "half-closed eyes looked not at Olga Ivanovna, but at the blanket" (90). The absence of an intentional gaze from the corpse contrasts with the accusatory gaze Olga feels from the environment. This juxtaposition between this purely realistic description of the corpse and Olga's hallucinatory grief illuminates Chekhov's argument that all meaning of death is evoked in the mind of the bereaved, not in the act of dying. Chekhov's meditations on death in Gusev follow the same formula as in The Grasshopper. Once again, dialogical interpretations of the act of dying are introduced, but they are complicated by perspective bias. Both dying characters make assumptions about the meaning of death that clearly relate to their personal outlook on life. Pavel Ivanitch's typically anti-authoritarian first monologue establishes his view that the deaths of the passengers at sea were the result of a conspiracy of doctors who "have neither conscience nor humanity" (254). Again, the narrative form makes it clear that Pavel's opinion that "the doctors put you on a steamer to get rid of you" because "you don't pay them money, you are a nuisance and you ruin their statistics with your deaths” is an extremely biased view of the situation, which the narrator does not share (254). As a monologue, filled with ellipses to signify natural patterns of speech, the narrative style of Pavel's speech is a clear indicator of a singular voice. The voice is then revealed to lack authority on the theme of death through the introduction of the most Chekhovian element of the plot, the breakdown of human communication. Pavel's audience "does not understand him" and misinterprets his social indignation as a remonstration (255). Because Pavel's vision of death cannot initially transcend his own point of view to reach even another perspective, it cannot yet be seen as an expression of a universal meaning for death . It is rather the multitude of visions of death, incommunicable and personal, which first seems to interest the text. Two more of these visions are found in Gusev's worries about succumbing to the ship's contagion. In a way, he worries about his family, admitting that he is afraid of dying because "without [him] everything will go to ruin, and before long I'm afraid my father and mother will beg their bread” (266). This line of dialogue shows that, for Gusev, death is closely linked to the fragility of his life as a peasant and is therefore thematically linked to the forces of oppression. But because.