Tale Of Two Cities

In A Tale of Two Cities, there are two characters, which are identified as lawyers. C.J. Stryver is one lawyer, and Sydney Carton is another lawyer. C.J Stryver was an arrogant, egotistical man who believed he was the best lawyer that existed. Sydney Carton was a succesfull lawyer, who did not like to be in the spotlight. So C.J. Stryver would not have been a successful lawyer without the help of Sydney Carton.

In a Tale of Two Cities, famous author Charles Dickens stated, “These are the best of times; these are the worst of times…” Being a teenager in today’s society, it is really easy to apply that quote to my personal feelings on this time in my life. Teenage years, also called adolescence, is a generally confusing time filled with many ups and downs. These ups and downs represent what is described as the best, and the worst, times of our lives.

The literature that came out of the French Revolution often shares common themes of death, rebirth, and destruction. Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens is much the same way. Throughout the novel, Dickens clearly supports the revolution but also depicts the brutality of the revolutionaries. Dickens uses powerful metaphors of a sea to symbolize the revolutionaries destroying old France and the belittling name of “Jacques” to depict the narcissistic views of the French aristocracy to show his support for the revolution.

In a Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens juxtapositions suspense and humor in an intricate tale of love and loyalty.

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.

A Tale of Two Cities, set in the era of the impending French Revolution, describes the life of the tyrannical nobility, the raging mob, and the dynamic central figures of the book. To portray these dynamic characters, Charles Dickens’ uses themes and motifs such as resurrection, secrecy, sacrifice, shadows, imprisonment and the women of the revolution knitting. Of these themes, sacrifice for happiness is most prevalent in Dickens’ writing, because he uses it to portray that, in order for someone to be truly happy, sacrifice is vital.

Two of the most common literary motifs are love and hate. In Charles Dickens’s novel A Tale of Two Cities there is a constant battle between love and hate. Love is representative in friendship and family. Hate is representative in revenge of the aristocracy. Lucie’s love is very evident for her friends and family, but her friends and family’s have been just as evident. Dickens shows that love overcomes hate, but with consequences when Darnay gives up his family name for the good of France but is still sentenced to death, when Miss Pross loses her hearing as result of defending the hypothetical life of Lucie Manette, and when Carton gives up his life for Lucie’s happiness.

Saint Antoine calls on it’s revolutionaries and in swift action they sweep the Bastille within the week. Dickens personifies Saint Antoine and makes the neighborhood bordering the Bastille the main antagonist inciting revolution. In fact, Madam Defarge doesn’t fight for vengeance, but for Saint Antoine. Expression materializing appearance of weakness exude from this passage. Haggard, starved, distress, miserable, squalid, and a score more assist in defining the state, “the great brotherhood of Spies had become”, and what their death march beats the drum to. People reside in the village of despair, and have become merely puppets of its liberation from societal pariah. Characters swiftly swept into undercurrents of preeminent plot.

Change is something that must come and will always come, whether it be for better or for worse. This is especially the case in the changing of power in our world, to spark this change, people will fight until they die. Everybody can justify their plight with speeches of justice and necessity, but whether or not the ends justify the means is something that every person must decide for themselves. The theme of revolution is explored in both A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens and Battleship Potemkin by Sergei Eisenstein, but their portrayals of it differ greatly. Throughout his Novel, Dickens clearly shows that he sympathizes with the peasants, but that he has very mixed feelings towards the way that the revolutionaries get what they want.

Working as a child in order to support his family while his father was in debtor’s prison, Charles Dickens had a firsthand experience with social injustice in the Victorian Era. Seventy years after the French Revolution began, Dickens published A Tale of Two Cities, which tied the injustice and oppression of the Revolution to his own time. Dickens believed in the novel as an important form of social commentary, and he used A Tale of Two Cities to shine a light on society’s problems. One of the themes of this novel, man’s inhumanity, shows how people can be incredibly cruel and heartless towards others. Dickens illustrates this theme of man’s inhumanity to his fellow men by using the symbols of blue-flies, scarecrows, and knitting.

Revolutions have occurred since the first oppressed people got fed up with a tyrannical leader. It has been the cry of the downtrodden since the beginning of time. Revolution is a word that symbolizes hope for a better future. It can be a dangerous thing because if not successful life for the common people might get worse than it originally was. Even if successful the new leaders can be as bad as those preceding. Dickens captures the essence of a revolution gone bad in his novel A Tale Of Two Cities. The intent of this short essay is to discuss and analyze Dickens' treatment of the theme of revolution in A Tale of Two Cities. It will attempt to show you how Dickens changes his mind midway through the novel about whether or not the revolutionaries in France are better than their aristocratic predecessors.

In the story, The Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens, the quote “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” relates to the six chapters in many ways among the three points: family and love, Hope and despair, and fate. To begin with, family and love explains how the father and daughter meet, also how they interact with each other after realizing who each other is, "A strange thrill struck him when she did so, and visibly pass over his frame; he laid the knife down’ softly, as he sat staring at her". (Page 43) Furthermore, Hope and Despair,

This beautifully tragic story brings home the idea of how man’s extraordinary ability of love and sacrifice, enables him to transform suffering into strength and find life in what appears