Ivan is a well respected lawyer. I think that Tolstoy wants us to think that Ivan’s life was nice, he wants us to feel like we would like his life in some sense. Tolstoy builds Ivan up then slowly takes him down. In fact as Ivan says himself, life becomes darker…
“in inverse proportion to the square of the distance from death”
By the end, the lesson that I took from the book was simply that it’s easy for your life to become meaningless. Constant introspection is necessary to live your life instead of someone else’s.