SOURCE: “Narrative Style and Structure in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” in Russian Literature Triquarterly, No. 1, Fall, 1971, pp. 399-412.

In the following essay, Luplow examines the central themes, plot, and narrative presentation of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, drawing attention to the use of shifting perspectives to underscore the various levels of meaning and experience within the novel.

The main emphasis in the small amount of critical literature thus far written on Solzhenitsyn’s short novel has generally been placed either on its value as a political document or on a descriptive analysis of the striking language employed in it. Such emphasis in the former case, treating the work as an expose of a previously veiled aspect of life in Stalinist Russia, is inherently interesting, but it is essentially irrelevant in a critical literary analysis of the work. Similarly, descriptive and etymological...