The Footsteps Die Out Rhetorical Analysis Prompts

Of the extraordinary amount of literary devices available to authors, Charles Dickens uses quite a few in his novel A Tale of Two Cities, which is set during the French Revolution. One of his more distinctive devices is character foils. The five sets of foils are Carton and Darnay, Carton and Stryver, Darnay and the Marquis de Evremonde, Madame Defarge, and Mr. Lorry and Jerry Cruncher. Dickens uses foil characters to highlight the virtues of several major characters in order to show the theme of personal, loving relationships having the ability to prevail over heartless violence and self-consuming vengeance.

In A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, isolation impacts Madame Defarge and Sydney Carton by altering their perception of life, influencing Madame to become obsessive with her vengeful goal of eliminating the aristocracy and damaging Carton by forcing him to contain his depressive emotions.

Humanity is inherently flawed. Charles Dickens illustrates this in his novel A Tale of Two Cities as he writes about the lives of the Manettes and the people they draw around them. In this novel, Dickens uses Sydney Carton, a main character in the novel and the lover of Lucie Manette, to reveal his thoughts about the inherent nature of humanity. The characteristics of humanity change and mutate with the experiences of each person and the workings of their own mind, as illustrated by Mr. Stryver’s inhumane and thoughtless treatment of Sydney, the first time Sydney saves Charles Darnay’s life, and Sydney’s love for Lucie Manette.

Most of the revolutionaries are peasants who have been severely neglected by the French government and aristocracy. These peasants all eventually rebel at the storming of the Bastille in 1789, and until 1794, violently killed many innocent people. During this time, the revolutionaries killed hundreds of prisoners for no reason, an event later known as the September Massacres. So violent were these massacres that “the eye could not detect one creature in the group free from the smear of blood” (203). Another sadistic and inhumane device used by the revolutionaries was “the sharp female newly-born, and called La Guillotine” (196). The guillotine was a machine used to behead prisoners, innocent and guilty alike, by the hundreds during the revolution. This guillotine was used to kill two characters in the novel, a seamstress and Sydney Carton. The seamstress is a perfect example of how the revolutionaries would kill anybody and everybody because of the Law of the Suspected. This law allows the Republic to imprison anyone on just suspicion, and they did not need any proof. The unstable Republic used this law many times to try and prevent plots from being formed that would overthrow the new government. On the day of their executions the seamstress says to Carton, “I have done nothing. I am not unwilling to die, if the Republic which is to do so much good to us poor, will

In this scene Dickens foreshadows how the peasants will react during the Revolution by stating, “There was a special companionship in it, an observable inclination on the part of everyone to join some other one, which led, especially among the luckier or lighter hearted, to frolicsome embraces, drinking of healths, shaking of hands, and even joining of hands and dancing, a dozen together” (21). The foreshadowed Revolution’s destruction and discourse will bring these people together in way they have never been before, and they will unite. Except with everything “good’ there must be something “bad”, and Dickens tells the reader that these peasants will stay the same hungry and weak people left to fend for themselves. Dickens also portrays how the peasants will look and act during the Revolution when he states, “Those who had been greedy with the staves of the cask, had acquired a tigerish smear across the mouth” (22). The smear of the wine across the mouths of the poor will be the blood from the nobles that the peasants brutally murder. The greed and tiger like qualities foreshadow how the peasants act during the fight, and also how they will kill the aristocracy. Dickens then adds commentary on the stains of the wine and how it will affect France and its history with the remark, “The time was to come, when that wine too would be spilled on the street stones, and when the stain of it would be red upon the many there” (22). The wine is the blood that will be spilt by the many violent deaths of the nobles and peons. The passage also shows how the history of the Revolution will be forever remembered. The scenes of the blood-thirsty frolicking peasants and predestined future of France add an element of horror and fate which entices the readers’

A Tale of Two Cities has several recurring themes, including the failure of the French Revolution. In the book, the peasants defeated the aristocrats by imprisoning and murdering them. Although many of the imprisonments and executions were unjust, the peasants had gain complete power. The peasants’ revolution did not end the tyranny that existed with the aristocrats ruling, but created a new tyranny with lack of justice and mercy.

Throughout Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, the guillotine is a persisting symbol of the French Revolution. It represents the revolutionary violence through which humanity loses its religious morality and a new, savage standard is created. By looking at the passage as a Student of Literature, the revolutionists, straying from ethics and God, are depicted through religious allusions. A Historian lens reveals Dickens condemnation of the bloodthirsty revolution that has normalized violence and stripped the people of humanity.

The era surrounding the French Revolution was a horrifically bloody and violent period of history – the best of times and the worst of times. The violence enacted by the citizens of French on their fellow countrymen set a gruesome scene in the cities and country sides of France. Charles Dickens uses a palate of storm, wine, and blood imagery in A Tale of Two Cities to paint exactly how tremendously brutal this period of time was.

In France, the years between 1789 and 1799 were a time of thoughtless inhumanity and brutality toward fellow man. These inhumane acts are carried through the by Revolutionaries and the nobility of France in these years and the years leading up to the French Revolution. The best illustration of the inhumanity felt and shown during this time is A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. Dickens uses metaphors as symbols throughout this book to exemplify his theme of thoughtlessness toward people from other people. Dickens develops these metaphors throughout the novel and manipulates them to fit different circumstances. He uses every day objects and ideas and makes them personifications of the Revolution and their unsympathetic mindsets and agendas. The symbols of the scarecrows and the birds of fine song and feather, the sea, and the wine represent the theme of inhumanity in Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities.

The Victorian era class system was founded upon three distinct social classes – upper, middle, lower – with marginal upward mobility granted to those of the lower and middle classes. Society in 19th century England determined an individual's value largely by the social class that individual belonged to, and by extension how much power and wealth that individual held. Naturally, primitive lower classmen such as Pip would struggle to find a respectable identity in a society founded upon social titles. Through a refusal to accept that social worth is determined at birth, Pip defies the predated victorian-era class system and proves to himself that hard work and self improvement is the true measure of self worth.

Charles Dickens novel "Great Expectations" first saw the light in 1860. In it the English novelist raised and criticized important issue for the time of social and psychological dissociation between the higher crust and simple working class. The genre of the novel features are located in the plane of the classic era of realism, generously spiced with the original English humor and a bit of European sentiment. "Great Expectations" - a novel of education, because it tells several stories of becoming a dignified young person:“So, I must be taken as I have been made. The success is not mine, the failure is not mine, but the two together make me.” It proves all above statements about ambiguity and depth of moral, which was described in it.

Within A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, there have been many references to the French Revolution throughout the book that help to contribute to the main message of the novel including elements analyzed by the following articles. The theme of violence as a tool to emphasize the significance of extremity for self-preservation in “Forms of Violence on the novel” by John Kucich and the theme of sacrifice from revolution in “Unwilling Sacrifices” by Russell L Keck contribute to the message that violence in unwilling sacrifices causes the deterioration of society in A Tale of Two Cities.

Charles Dickens wrote A Tale of Two Cities to promote his ideas to his English audience and inform them that if their ways of life in England continued to take place, their country would take the same turn as France. The citizens’ desires for revenge, thirst for blood, and willingness to kill even the innocent are all terrifying thoughts and the way Dickens portrays these terrible events is enough to make anyone want to avoid at all costs. Although this novel was written for Dickens’ time, the same thoughts and ideas could easily be applied to today’s events and is something to keep in mind when deciding to do the right thing. The words Dickens chooses, the development of his characters, and the horrible images he puts in his reader’s head is the reason his book helped show what could happen if one submits himself to

The beginning of the video started off by introducing a man named John Dickens, who worked at a naval pay office on the docks of Portsmouth, and lived in a small house at 387 Mile End Terrace. His wife was Elizabeth Barrow who he met at his office, and who he also had a kid with named, Charles Dickens. But within 7 months of Charles being born everything seemed to go wrong for them, from running into financial problems to being forced to move to several different locations, until they settled in a house up the hill from the docks of Chatham, London. This is where Charles had his happiest memories of his childhood.

The French Revolution mainly took place in the city of Paris during the late 1700’s. The Revolution did not only affect the people of France, but also the citizens of England as well. The French Revolution is known as one of the most brutal and inhumane periods of history. If one studied the beliefs and views of the people involved at the time, one would see a reoccurring theme of “ being recalled to life”. Born from the world of literature, Charles Dickens’ novel, A Tale of Two Cities takes a deeper look at the culture of the late 1700’s, in both England and France. Dickens uses the character of Lucie Manette to further examine one of the major themes presented in the novel, consisting of the belief of one being