Changes in Language and Language Use - Coursework Example

One of the ways Solzhenitsyn’s work deviates from the conventions of movie genres of the 1950s is the manner in which stylistic devices have been used. Particularly, the author of the movie goes against the grains of the time to use suspense. At the time, it is obvious that the movie industry had begun using suspense, but this suspense had been forward-looking. Contrary to this approach, Solzhenitsyn’s suspense is forward-looking. Particularly, in the opening of the movie, the plotline is set running straight onwards, without the provision of any background information.

For instance, the movie begins with the sounding of a wake-up call in a Stalinist labor camp, on a chilly winter morning, in 1951. Because of this, the audience is compelled to concentrate on the details being provided in the movie, in order to make meaning out of the movie’s sudden and unexplained beginning. This stylistic device sets One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich apart from its contemporaries. This serves as a point of departure between Solzhenitsyn’s work and others’.

Other literary works had not had the solid resolve as Solzhenitsyn’s, to depict the excesses of autocratic regimes. The excesses of Stalinism are exemplified in the lives of the prisoners. For instance, most of the prisoners have been incarcerated, mainly on grounds of suspicion. Shukhov is sentenced to a life of imprisonment and cruel punishment in this Soviet gulag system for acts of espionage, though he is innocent. In like manner, Alyoshka is a devout Baptist, full of faith but is imprisoned, all the same.

The heartlessness of Stalinism in this camp is attested by a scarcity of food and food rationing and the compelling of prisoners to work in freezing temperatures, as long as this temperature does not fall below -42oC. Overall, there is lucidity in observing that Solzhenitsyn’s work is not dedicated to withstanding the highhandedness of Stalinism, but to reveal to the world, the inhuman excesses of Stalinism. The import of this is that One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is different from other film genres since it surpasses the common role of entertainment to take on a moral cause (Solzhenitsyn, 1988, 125).

The themes and motifs that Solzhenitsyn’s work advances present a point of conformance with other works of art.