Recurring
Themes
in
Dickens'
A Tale of
Two Cities
- Order and disorder
- Death and resurrection
- Contrasting social classes
- Role of memory
- Dickens' humor
British and American English Historical influences Dickens' Humor
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Recurring Themes in Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities
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NB: Recall my disclaimer for defining a word or term. "de" and "fin" are Latin for "about" and "line." Thus, to define something is to encircle a concept with language. For example, I feel nervous and unsettled when I climb up to the roof to read my Whitman poetry. I visit the doctor and he informs me that I suffer from Vertigo. I feel somewhat better because I now know, with the help of language, the source and cause of my reaction to heights. Does this cure my issue? Of course not right away, but I am on the way to better health in high places. Does it provide a better understanding of the context of my issue? Yes, and that is the same pattern of understanding we will try to emulate by illuminating some themes in this text.
Order and Disorder: Contrast The order of Tellson's Bank with the mob that madly devours the red wine in the streets of Paris.
Death and Resurrection:
Memory and Reminiscence:
Presentation of classes: why does the narration present us with the upper and lower classes of France and seems to focus mainly on the middle class in England?
Technical Aspects:
Alienation: simply the condition of being isolated, estranged. Most characters, and most people, suffer from loneliness but each reacts differently. For your written work, evaluate the reactions. In life and literature, the way we react and respond to a situation offer reveals our character.
Honor's definition of alienation: sometimes generally used to suggest depersonalization, disenchantment, estrangement, or powerlessness, alienation is actually a philosophical word with a lengthy history. The most particular conceptions appear in Hegelianism, Marxism and existentialism. Simply put, in Hegel, alienation's were various stages in the development of human consciousness: the lowest was immediate perception of sense-data, the next a consciousness of self, the next the abstraction of reason, and finally the world of the spirit, manifest in religion and art. Alienation is perhaps not the happiest translation of his Entaüsserung, which was the dialectical (see dialectic) process by which the mind moved from one of these stages to the next -- a move which entailed the recognition of the illusion of the first stage and a move beyond it, as if the mind became alien to itself, only to return to itself later in a higher stage. In Marx alienation meant the proletariats economic, psychological and other senses of separation from the products of their labor, the forces of production, and his own social formation (see also species-being). In existentialism, generally, alienation is the experience of the world as absurd (see authentic, Dasein).
Guilt: remorseful awareness of having done something wrong.
Content for the above was copied and gleaned from a great teaching resourse: Novels for Students, Volumes 1-12. Comp. and Ed. Elizabeth Thomason. Michigan: Gale Group, 1999.