“Nothing Special” is a wonderful short story that details the happy and not so special moments of two characters and their close friends and family. Written by Viktoria Tokareva, it is realistically optimistic yet at the same time incredibly depressing story about two people who fall in love but cannot be together due to their personal problems. During the class discussion it was brought up various times that the main characters were “hated” because of their lack of motivation to change their lives. Their self-pitying and self-destructive tendencies were not very well tolerated by the students.
The class did not favor the behavior of the main characters, Margo and Ivan, because it reflects natural human responses to tragedy and trauma, but realistically speaking, their reactions are heavily supported by the events in their lives. Margo and Ivan may not have acted like a traditional hero or heroine in a story, but they have a many good reasons to act the way they did. Margo is the easiest character in “Nothing Special” to sympathize with. Throughout the first ten pages of the short story, there is a brief overview of her life.
Orphaned at 13, the only family she has is her son. She is a working single mother who is waiting for happiness to come to her. Her action of waiting for happiness is the start of where opinions in class concerning the character start to conflict. The class was confused why Margo just sat there day to day, waiting for happiness instead of being proactive and finding it herself. Yet, if anyone took a step back and analyzed their own personal lives, it should not be a surprise that the majority of people do the very same thing.
For example, a typical college student goes to and from class every day with nothing special in a typical day or week and most of them are waiting for happiness to hit them in the head. Happiness comes in many different shapes and sizes, what could be happiness for someone could be bad luck to another. But one thing that stereotypically makes anyone happy is love. Love is what Margo is waiting for. It is understandable why Margo is craving love so dearly. She has never been loved before, and the author makes that clear when detailing the life Margo has led.
Although it is emphasized that Margo was born under a lucky star, she was born under a pretty unlucky star concerning love. She dating record is subpar and she tends to fall for men who are no good for her. She became enamored with an Arab called Bedr el- Din Maria Muhammad. An international situation would not allow him to stay in Russia, so he left although not before Margo got pregnant and had a son. Her next “boyfriend” was no better, in fact if anything the relationship should make any girl sympathize with Margo . Margo fell in love with Gena, who warned her he was in love with someone else.
Margo had a very forward warning, and yet it does not stop her from being affectionate and falling in love with him. Although Margo is not smart about choosing to be in a one sided relationship, it is easy to sympathize with someone so desperate. She wants to be happy and in order for her to accomplish her goal, she needs to fall in love. As the novel states, “Margo knew how to live for the moment and didn’t look ahead. ” Margo’s behavior is a foolish way to act but no incentive to hate her character. Margo accomplishes her goal: she wants to fall in love and she does.
Unfortunately Gena did not love her back. One striking line right before the accident, as they were flying into the crash Margo turns to Gena, holds his hand and says, “I’m happy. ” Although to a reader this relationship is obviously unhealthy and will never be the sort of love to desire, it made Margo happy because she had never been in love before. To her, the one sided love affair with Gena is the best relationship she had ever experienced. It made her happy and it should make the reader glad to know that in the possibly last few seconds of her life, the one overwhelming emotion she felt was happiness.
Margo’s relationship with Ivan is the emotional climax of the whole story. Ivan finds Margo at her physical and emotional low point. She has just survived a car crash that no one realistically should have survived; she has tubes coming in and out of her all over her body, and she has just lost the one person she ever loved. It takes Margo a few days to realize what has happened to her, but in the meantime Ivan feels a need to take extra good care of her. He nurses her with cranberry juice and at one point cries because he sees how much pain Margo is in.
It is here we start to sense how love deprived Margo has been her whole life. Yes she has loved before, but no one has loved her in return. “To be really honest, no one had ever cried on her account. She was ready to surrender an arm and a leg if only he would sit like that beside her and cry on account of her. ” This quote from the book really pinpoints why Margo starts to fall in love with Ivan. With all her previous boyfriends she took care of them, she had a son and she took care of him as well. Yet no one ever really loved Margo enough to take care of her until Ivan comes along.
Ivan shows some chivalry and carries her to the x-ray room. Tokareva describes Margo’s feelings in accordance to the last quote; “No one had ever carried her in his arms, only her parents when she was a child. ” It is hard not to pity Margo’s budding feelings, and harsh to judge them negatively. Finally what Margo has been waiting for comes and hits her in the head again, except this time it is even better than before. Before she found love with Gena who did not exactly care a lot about her. Now she has Ivan, who shows her this affection that she has not experienced since she was a child.
Ivan continues to show affection to Margo through little things he does. She gradually falls more and more in love. Ivan is also a complicated character but in a completely different manner. It is easier to accept the class’s hatred towards him. Ivan is stuck, and he could have a better life if he was not so set in his ways. It’s almost like he lost hope of ever being more than he already is and has accepted his living situations. For better or for worse, he is stuck in a boring repetitive life with a daughter and a wife he hates.
As readers you pity him, because in a sharp contrast to Margo who has hope of finding happiness, we encounter Ivan who has long given up on finding love and is completely content being unhappy. He blames everything around him but himself, when in reality the situation he finds himself is entirely his fault. His inability to make a conscious decision with some foresight of possible consequences or repercussions has cornered him into a lonely and unhappy life. When Nadezhda became pregnant, it was obvious this was not the plan he envisioned for himself.
In a pitiful attempt to escape the corner he had stuck himself in, he tried to convince Nadezhda to get rid of the baby with an ultimatum. Obviously, it did not work and the baby is kept. As the baby grows up, Ivan accepts his fate and condemns himself to a life he did not want. He is almost punishing himself with unhappiness for being unable to stand up properly to the things in life he wanted. His marriage to Nadezhda is obviously an unhappy one. There are no feelings of love or companionship: it was solely based on the foundation that Ivan had to do what was socially correct and expected.
This marriage is the main reason Ivan felt stuck, like he could not move forward with his life or do anything other than be a surgeon, go to and from work, and spend his free time with the wife he did not love. In fact, both members of the marriage feel stuck, but both never do anything about it. Ivan wrapped himself up in his loneliness and eventually he began to like, and Nadezhda would call her friends and complain about how depressing her life was. The students in class hated that Ivan did nothing, was idle and unmotivated to change his life for the better.
Realistically speaking, there are many people who do the same thing. In French, there is a term for a lackluster way of day to day living: “La Vie Quotidienne. ” This is a term used to describe a boring, repetitive, routine kind of life. A life a lot like the one Ivan leads, unhappy and repetitive. There was nothing special about Ivan’s life, and as a result Ivan believed there was nothing special about him. That is, there is nothing special until Margo came along. There is no real explanation of why he falls in love with Margo rather than another one of his patients.
But it happens gradually, without him realizing until one day it hits him. He saved her from death, and he nursed her back to health. Margo was his creation, she was his savior and he was hers. His persistence in helping someone he did not know stay alive and healthy is something new to him. It does not seem that his wife or daughter needed him with such a passion. In contrast Margo needs Ivan to live, and eventually for her happiness. What really awoke Ivan from his boring life, his “Vie Quotidienne”, was the realization that Margo was just as lonely as he was.
Margo suffered emotional and physically pain, and so did he. Misery loves company, and so does loneliness; Margo and Ivan were two lonely people waiting for something to make life worth living. Margo wanted happiness and love, and Ivan wanted to find love, too. When finally Margo and Ivan both realize they are in love with each other, it is a most beautiful and romantic meeting. With Ivan running to her door, and Margo crying out of happiness, it is easy feel happy for them. In fact, it is almost relief to see two unhappy people finally become happy.
Two previously very lonely people have found each other and finally have something to fight for in life. Margo has her knight in shining armor and Ivan has “the one” girl he had been waiting for his whole life. Everything is so much better than it previously was. For Ivan, a fog had been lifted, suddenly he can see the sky better and take joy in simple things in life. It is a nice change from the glum, insecure Ivan that we had originally met. Through Margo, Ivan had been given a second chance to live life, almost in the same way Margo has a second chance to live life because Ivan saved her.
A chance to live the life he had originally intended to live. Nadezhda had taken away twenty six years and a future away from Ivan, and Margo was giving him a chance to claim those years back. Love changes both Ivan and Margo, even if the love is short lived. In their initial conversation, they admit the flaws of the people they used to be before meeting each other. These flaws are exactly what made the class hate these characters. But these flaws are realistic, negative and human. Ivan admitted he was “living by habit,” something that the majority of the human population is guilty of.
Margo admitted she was a “beggar for love,” and this too, is an extremely common trait in people. It is wrong to criticize behaviors that we readers tend to indulge in on a weekly basis, and it is hard to hate or dislike characters who act so naturally. It is a breath of fresh air to read about a hero and heroine to whom anyone can relate to. The love Ivan and Margo have for each other is the special flare in their lives. It wakes them up from living their routine lives and suddenly, their “nothing special” lives mean something. It especially wakes Ivan up.
When Ivan leaves Margo to go to his daughter’s birthday party, something happens to him. Suddenly he is confident and knows what he wants. He realizes as he saw his daughter and wife, that he is not anything to his family, which is completely opposite of what he feels around Margo. He is simply a supplier of their needs. Ivan loves his daughter, but as he enters her birthday party it is visible that her spoiled behavior gives him even more incentive to leave his family. For the first time, he looks at Nadezhda and truly realizes the overwhelming hate he had fostered all these years for her.
The author highlights the hate by completely destroying, inch by inch, Nadezhda’s physical and emotional image. She is mean, fat, ugly, had no eyelashes why should Ivan stay? As reader’s we side with Ivan even though he is contemplating doing a terrible thing. No father should leave a family and his wife, but the way he sees Nadezhda and Oksana at this moment is revolutionary for the opinions on Ivan. Quickly we realize that Ivan’s family appreciates him as much as he appreciates them. His loneliness had estranged him from both Nadezhda and Oksana and if he left, it is hard to believe he would be missed.
Ivan’s love for Margo not only awoke him from his life but gave him the courage to stand up for himself against everything that held him down. Unfortunately, Margo’s unlucky star strikes again. Ivan has a heart attack, and never comes back to Margo. It was like his heart attack was a reset button, a warning. As he considered standing up for himself and going after Margo to be in love with the one girl he had been waiting for his entire life, his heart attack takes him a step back. The heart attack was for Ivan a major step back because never again did he attempt to think of poor Margo who was left waiting for him to return.
His abandonment of Margo is a point in the novel where it’s understandable to see why the class does not like Ivan. Yet he acts in such a way because the heart attack heightens his insecurities. At one point he questions what he could ever give or offer to Margo and he could not find a single good thing to bring to the table. His old age is a quality that constantly haunts him. Just like Nadezhda had taken away his years when he was younger, it is almost like he felt he was inflicting the same pain on Margo by being with her.
Then he has a near-death experience with this heart attack that he knows is due to age, and those insecurities are imposed even stronger on his conscience. Sympathizing with both characters is complicated but understandable. They are not likely heroes of a story but both are realistic and extremely easy to relate to. Regardless if the students in class agreed, the majority of people can relate to both Ivan and Margo on many different levels. With Margo it is easiest to relate to her insecurities when it comes to the subject of love. She is waiting for happiness and many people are in the same shoes.
People wait in different ways such as engulfing themselves in a job or schoolwork, or living their “Vie Quotidiennes. ” Margo managed life day by day, living by the moments, waiting for happiness in her own way. Yet what more can she do but wait for it? She cannot go on an online dating site or a singles club; she has to meet the right man on her own terms. And any girl should know that sometimes you have to wait for the good ones to come along. As for her reaction after surviving a near death experience, while I have never experienced anything remotely close to this type of trauma, I can sympathize why she acted the way she did.
She was emotionless because what are you supposed to feel after nearly dying, and on top of that being the only survivor of the crash? We should feel numb because a traumatizing event just happened. She nearly died and yet students in class could not understand why she felt no emotion. Her life was nothing special and this catapulted her straight into the loving arms of Ivan. He made her be grateful for still being alive, because for Margo she just lost someone she loved. Ivan makes her realize that what she had with Gena was terrible, and for the first time she is loved back.
Ivan is a little harder to understand. He is just a very sad person in general. The fact that he has completely given up, that he has just accepted the fate that he has been handed is a difficult to swallow. But then I look around and I see people who are so set in their ways, they too have given up. The secretaries I work with have a similar life, they come to work 9 to 5 every day and go home to their family and wake up the next day to do it all over again. Their lives are nothing special. But Margo and the love Ivan had for her is understandable. Margo is Ivan’s mid-life crisis.
Some men buy expensive cars, Ivan has an affair with one of his patients. He has a chance to break from reality and experience something magical, something special. His heart attack is a rude slap right back to reality. He is able to leave Margo forever even though he loved her so much because she was just a blip in his lifetime. Even if he had left his family for Margo like he was planning, eventually the shame would have caught up with him. He was already so ashamed that he had asked Nadezhda to get rid of the baby. Furthermore he was so ashamed he killed a dog, he ripped a button off the officers jacket to go to jail for a night.
It was better for Ivan to leave before his love affair with Margo became too serious. Although I do not like Ivan as a character since I cannot understand very well his insecurities and personality, I completely understand his behavior towards Margo and his family. Ivan believes he cannot offer what Margo needs, that he is an old and grumpy man who cannot make her happy. Eventually, these insecurities were going to rise to the surface regardless of Ivan’s heart attack. The heart attack was a fast forward into what eventually would have happened.
Overall, although the class did not favor the characters in the short story, “Nothing Special”, the characters were human, and acted realistically to the situations they found themselves in. Perhaps the students in class were expecting a hero and heroine in the story to act morally and to stand up for what they believe in. Ivan and Margo are not typical heroes or strong main characters of a story; they are normal human beings whom anyone should be able to relate to. Their human characteristics are their downfall of their popularity, but for me it is what makes “Nothing Special” a wonderful short story.
