After reading A Tale of Two Cities, I was assigned to write a literary analysis on a significant passage that I read. It wasn’t very hard for me to choose which passage I wanted to write about because I had marked this one with a sticky note beforehand. I like the poetry and figurative language used in the passage that will be identified in my literary analysis.
A Tale of Two Cities, written by Charles Dickens, tells the story of a family living in England during the French Revolution. The pages of this book follow the sad story of the hate, revenge, and death that took place in the French Revolution. Developed in this book, is the theme that the lust for revenge can completely destroy a people. The following excerpt from A Tale of Two Cities tells of how revenge twists people’s minds into terrible things. On page 374 it reads,
“Along the Paris streets, the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh. Six tumbrels carry the day’s wine to La Guillotine. All the devouring and insatiate Monsters imagined since imagination could record itself, are fused in one realization, Guillotine. And yet there is not in France, with its rich variety of soil and climate, a blade, a leaf, a root, a sprig, a peppercorn, which will grow to maturity under conditions more certain than those that have produced this horror. Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind.”
In this passage, the crude carriages are taking the condemned aristocrats to the Guillotine. Sydney Carton is on one of these death-carts. Although not an aristocrat, he is posing as his friend who is one. This is the major climax of the book, when Carton is going to sacrifice his life in order for his friend to live.
The carts are old and rickety, and the spirits of many dead aristocrats seem to dwell there. The day’s wine is the blood that is routinely spilt by the guillotine. All the fears that the convicts had before, are put to shame by the terrible Guillotine. On the other hand, the Parisians are captivated by the death and blood of aristocrats, almost as if it’s a drug. Nothing happy or good can take place when such hate and death are the main focus of a society. These blood thirsty people have been so fixed upon an end goal of eliminating all inequality that they have become a twisted people, doing evil things they never would have done before.
The tone of the passage is mournful. The voice seems to lament over how such a crime could be committed. The voice is also a voice of caution, a warning to never let something like this happen again.
This passage follows the theme of how the lust for revenge can completely destroy a people. The words portray the pain, suffering, and death that the lust for revenge brings. It illustrates how nothing good can happen to a nation full of blood-thirsty people. Then, it warns us of how we must work hard so these terrible events will never repeat themselves.
No comments:
Post a Comment