Chekhov's post-Sakhalin stories 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 any singular meaning. Rather, the protagonists' multiple interpretations of death in The Grasshopper and Gusev mean that death can be implicated in social injustice, personal transcendence, or existential meaninglessness, depending on the views of whoever judges it. This implies that death may be assigned meaning by people and their ideologies, but 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 extremely individualized points of view. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay First, because Dymov died from performing 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 are presented with the prospect that one can die sacrificially for the benefit of others. But that view is complicated by evidence of the speaker's biases. The reader is given only Korostelev's word in support of "death to 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 the author's commentary on death in general. This is evident in the way Korostelev's judgment is expressed: “'and what moral strength!' he kept getting angrier and angrier at someone” (89). The third-person, impartial-voiced narrator draws specific 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 since this vision is drawn from a 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. His disappearance and the subsequent memory of their life together are necessary for Olga to realize that Dymov's contemporaries “had all seen in him a future celebrity” (89). Olga Ivanovna, obsessed with celebrity and prestige, interprets her husband's death as a revelation of her social stature. Fame, rather than progress or moral leadership, is the most important thing to escape death according to Olga. 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 narrative focuses on Olga's subjective view of the room containing Dymov's deathbed: “The walls, the ceiling, the lamp and the carpet on the floor winked at her mockingly, as if trying to say : 'you missed your chance!'” (89). The shift in narrative mode from passive description (“he realised”) to perspectival focus shows that Dymov's death is only socially relevant 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 Dymov's demise as the rise of stardom until thenunknown. Now that the reader has seen two highly personalized interpretations of death, he or she may suspect that these interpretations say more about the observers of the act than about the act of death itself. In death, Dymov no longer has any agency or identity, so it is up to his widow and colleague to project hers onto him. This is supported by the third-person omniscient narrator's neutral view of the deceased. Chekhov writes that "only his forehead, his black eyebrows, and his familiar smile proved that it was Dymov" (89). At the beginning of the story, these characteristics were commented on as signifiers of the portrait-like 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 dead Dymov has no character of his own, so it follows that all values ​​attributed to his passing are inspired by external perspectives, not the physical reality of his death. Regarding his lack of free will, it is said that his "squinted eyes looked not at Olga Ivanovna, but at the blanket" (90). The absence of an intentional gaze on the part of the corpse is contrasted with the accusatory gaze that Olga feels from the environment. This juxtaposition between this purely realistic description of the corpse and Olga's hallucinatory pain clarifies Chekhov's point that any meaning of death is evoked in the mind of the mourner, not in the act of dying. Chekhov's meditations on death in Gusev follow the same formula as in The Grasshopper. Once again, dialogic interpretations of the act of dying are introduced, but they are complicated by perspective biases. The two dying characters make assumptions about the meaning of death that are clearly tied to their personal outlook on life. Pavel Ivanych's typically anti-authoritarian first monologue establishes his opinion that the deaths of passengers at sea are the result of a conspiracy by doctors who "have no conscience nor humanity" (254). Once again, the narrative form makes it clear that Pavel's opinion that "doctors put you on a steamer to get rid of you" because "you don't pay them money, you are a nuisance and ruin their statistics with your deaths" is an extremely partial vision of the situation, not shared by the narrator (254). Being a monologue, full of ellipses to indicate natural speech patterns, the narrative style of Pavel's speech is an obvious indicator of a singular voice. The voice is then shown to lack authority on the topic of death by introducing what is the most Chekhovian of plot elements, the breakdown of human communication. Pavel's audience “does not get it” and misinterprets his social indignation as a warning (255). Since Pavel's view of death cannot initially transcend his own point of view to reach even another perspective, it cannot yet be considered an expression of a universal meaning of death. Rather, it is the multitude of incommunicable, personally defined visions of death that the text appears to be interested in for the first time. Two more of these visions are visible in Gusev's worries about succumbing to the ship's contagion. On the one hand, he worries about his family, admitting that he is afraid of dying because “without [him] everything will fall apart, and before long I am afraid that my father and mother will beg for their bread” ( 266). This line of dialogue shows that, for Gusev, death is most relevantly connected to the fragility of his life as a peasant, and is therefore thematically linked to forces of oppression. But, since this is expressed in the dialogue, and since this dialogue refers to a dream motif.