A Tale of Two Cities

Charles Dickens' novel, A Tale of Two Cities is a historical fiction novel about the struggle of the French during the revolution and the injustice that prevailed during the so-called liberators' reign. The plot follows characters from London and a few in Paris that all face the bitter retribution of the Revolution, including accusing a nephew of his uncles' crimes and seeking revenge through the sweeping executions by guillotine.

Throughout the novel, wine is used as a symbol, a symbol for the bloody revolution to come and as a symbol for the people's hunger for something new and more than the meager existence prior to the revolution. During one scene in the novel a cask of wine falls and splits open in the street and the beleaguered, malnourished people scramble like so many rats to spilling wine, and drink it up. Dickens uses this symbol in order to show the people's thirst for blood, their thirst for vengeance on the aristocracy, a burning desire for the bloody justice owed them for the terrible crimes inflicted upon them. The wine shop itself is the headquarters of the revolutionaries, wherein Madame Defarge plots against those who've wronged her family in the past, such as Darnay and Lucie both of which she attempts to have executed. Wine, in this novel, is the essence of revenge, the lifeblood of the revolution and is used to show how depraved the masses of France had become in order to begin executing any and all the nobles who dared cross their paths.

"A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this."
This passage from A Tale of Two Cities gives an accurate air of the suppressed feelings the lower classes had leading up to the bloody Revolution. The passage gives readers a sense that all the people of the lower classes had been feeling the same thing, they were a singly minded organism, breathing and building up their hatred together while not acting on their thoughts. The people, prior to the Revolution, were all equally subjugated by the small class of people, all of them being held in contempt by the wealthy and their so-called 'betters.'
In my opinion, this is a good novel, however, Dickens' style is very particular and unfit for contemporary readers, in a sense. The complications of such a descriptive book can be a challenge for modern readers to grasp. The underlying meaning and symbolic nature of the book can be clearly seen once the description and metaphor is stripped away. On the whole, though, it is a good book and a very good example of metaphor and symbolism.

The Importance of Being Earnest

“Jack: How can you sit there, calmly eating muffins when we are in this horrible trouble, I can’t make it out. You seem to me to be perfectly heartless.
“Algernon: Well, I can’t eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them.”
Oscar Widle’s The Importance of Being Earnest is a farce that satirizes and greatly exaggerates the life of the aristocracy in the Victorian age. Wilde’s use of hyperbole gives the play a comedic air, an atmosphere of silliness and exaggeration. The passage above uses muffins in comparison to the blind following of miniscule details and meaningless things in life as to what is truly important, such as both men’s fiancées breaking off their engagement, if only for the silly matter of a name, or lack thereof.
The passage is a perfect example of Wilde’s message from play because of the utter ridiculousness of the situation, worrying more about butter getting onto your cuffs than of the situation of your future marriage. This passage is easily my favorite from the entire play because it nearly sums up the entire silly plot of Wilde’s play, manifesting the idea of ridiculing the aristocrats in one simple situation. This passage is one of the many instances of comedic relief from an entirely disregarded situation, such as a broken off engagement or the discovery of a man’s true parents and origins.
The work as a whole was just a silly farce. As it was meant to be, however, the play has a consistent storyline which gives the farce a more serious tone, making the situations more apparent to the readers which, in turn, makes readers care more about what has happened to the characters than even they seem to. The entire cast of characters has a contemptuous disregard of anything serious, and they seem to be wearing blinders, put on at birth and enforced by custom, to keep them from wanting anything that matters, to make sure they don’t stray away from the set course, laid out by those such as the opinionated, officious, and brainless Lady Bracknell.

Cat's Cradle

Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Cat’s Cradle, while being a novel, on the surface, of a man’s creation a super weapon with terrifying potential and its use, is a true commentary on blind belief in the logic of the sciences or in religions which are created for the sole purpose of control over populations in which they are implemented.
The most obvious of these symbols is the very creation of the carless Dr. Hoenniker, ice-nine. Ice-nine, as described the narrator and the characters that are knowledgeable of it, is the last creation of the father of the atomic age. Hoenniker, for the simple reason of being able to, created a weapon that could destroy, and would destroy, the world in a matter of moments. The god-like power of ice-nine is used as a symbol of science’s terrifyingly advancing rate and the proliferation of arms that is caused by the rapid acceleration of physical science and the carelessness of those who bring their destructive power to bear. This idea of reckless disregard for the horrifying might of these weapons is made evident through not only Dr. Hopenniker, but his children as well, each of his children were gifted a fragment of ice-nine, each of them relinquished a portion of it to world powers, in one way or another. The USSR and the United States both received a portion of it, during the height of the cold war arms race. And yet none of them seemed to care at all for the repercussions of this, not until the world’s oceans froze over and the ‘purple worms’ descended from the sky and tore what remained of the Earth to shreds. Until as was lost, they felt no remorse for their actions and Vonnegut’s use of this symbol is astounding.
“I recalled an advertisement for a set of children’s books called The Book of Knowledge. In that ad, a trusting boy and girl looked up at their father. ‘Daddy,’ one asked, ‘what makes the sky blue?’ The answer, presumably, could be found in The Book of Knowledge.
“If I had my daddy beside me as Mona and I walked down the road from the palace, I would have had plenty of questions to ask as I clung to his hand. ‘Daddy, why are all the trees broken? Daddy, why are all the birds dead? Daddy what makes the sky so sick and wormy? Daddy what makes the sea so hard and still?’ It occurred to me that I was qualified to answer those questions better than any other human being, provided there were other human beings alive.”
This passage, post the end of the world, at the hands of ice-nine, instills a feeling of loneliness and sadness in a reader. A feeling that man is truly lonely, that there is no one else to answer the great questions or even the small, nagging ones that can never be answered by any one but ourselves. The melancholy effect of such a passage makes one ask themselves, who, if not us, meaning human beings, will be there to ask such questions, to wonder, to think, to dream, of why the trees are broken.
I think that Vonnegut’s use of language and symbols in the novel are masterful. I enjoyed the symbolic nature of the book, finding his commentary on a rapidly advancing technological and logical society insightful and well-developed. However, the physical and concrete book was rather difficult to read. The style used by Vonnegut can become rather convoluted and difficult to follow, especially in his books such as Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five where the plot is not a sequence of events but rather a compilation of thoughts and ideas from the entire timeline of the novel. Overall, the book was a wonderful piece of literature.

The Handmaid's Tale

"I can spend minutes, tens of minutes, running my eyes over the print: FAITH. It's the only things they've given me to read. If I were caught doing it, what would it count? I didn't put the pin cushion here myself." This excerpt from Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale is an example of the struggle that the Handmaids and the other various female characters throughout the book face. Offred's struggle is only one of many potential stories that Atwood could have acknowledge. This book could have just as easily been The Martha's Tale or The Wives' Tale or even The Econowives Tale. But why did Margaret Atwood choose to make it central on the Handmaid's struggle? What made Offred's story the one she chose to write about? I believe that the novel was written from the point of view of a Handmaid in order to maximize the emotional toll on the readers. How could the story of a housemaid instill the same emotion as that of a woman who is passed around men in order to carry their seed and treated as nothing but a womb and a pair of ovaries? The answer is simple, it wouldn't.
Atwood's use of faith in this novel is miraculous, creating a society blinded by their faith in politics, creating a nation of overly pious zealots, where fear and faith rule their lives, and their reproductive cycles. The Bible is used a symbol of both undying faith and the sugjugation of women in the novel, where the Bible is steadfastly followed, quite literally, in everything it says, and while the 'Good Book' is followed so rigidly, women are not permited to read it, or anything else for that matter, in fear of them rediscovering themselves. The Commander read to his women, from the bible, on a regular basis, on the night of the Ceremony, in order to pass on the righteous knowledge held within, and therefore out of reach for any lacking the correct genitalia. The Bible is used in the novel as more than just a symbol for the zealotry that's taken hold of the Republic of Gilead, it's used in order to bring the opression to readers in a physical sense, to force us, as observers, to truly understand what it is to be a woman in the new age of the world.
The entire novel centralizes on Offred's new life in this world of men and God and her reminisces of what it was to be a woman, a wife, and a mother before all of society was controlled by the holy men of the military. The idea that women were forced to give up their lives to their husbands or other suitable men is heart-wrenching, that Women were forced to be second-class citizens due to their lack of equipment below the waist is a terrible, foreboding thought. However, Atwood's use of language throughout the novel, and her stunning skill in the use of devices displayst he terrible world of Gilead in a remarkable way so that, while being a tale of woman's struggle against the government and opression it keeps the attention of the reader in a hopeful way, holds our attention raptly so much that readers hope for Offred's suffering to end and for women to be liberated.

Anthem

" 'We love you.' But then they frowned and shook their head and looked at us helplessly. 'No,' They whispered, 'that is not what we wished to say.' They were silent, then they spoke slowly, and their words were halting, like a child learning to speak for the first time: 'We are one... alone... and only... and we love you who are alone... alone... and only.' We looked in each other's eyes and we knew that the breath of a miracle had touched us, and fled, and left us groping vainly."
This excerpt from Anthem is a heart wrenching example of humanity's struggle for individuality, and the undying instinct of love, despite the zealous attempts to make men into automatons; devoid of all emotion and desire for meaning. Prometheus' character begins to discover self in the very beginning of the novel wherein his desire to be a Scholar overrides his enforced service as a Street Sweeper. Prometheus, essentially, reinvents electricity, attempting to usher in a new age, where men are not shackled to predestined obligations, and bringing about the ideas and technology of the Unmentionable Times back to the light.
Ayn Rand displays the human struggle for sense and self wonderfully in the novel, bringing Prometheus' struggle to the readers with his catalogued thoughts, and the bitter motes of rediscovered emotion. Along with his very thoughts and emotions, Rand makes the struggle concrete in Prometheus' rediscovery of the lightbulb. All of man, it seems, has regressed to a state of collectivism where technology is shunned and the ideals of creativity, self expression, and (obviously) individualism are erased from the minds of all, forcing them to BE the whole, rather than a part of it. Prometheus' and Gaea's discovery of individual lvoe, a favoring of another over all men, is an essential symbol of the novel, showing that even with total obliteration of self and the indvidual, love, the most primal of all human emotions, cannot be whipped out of humanity. No matter how utterly decimated, love cannot be beaten from the human mind, it will always break free, tear down the walls of the collective and break the barriers such as "The word 'We' is as lime poured over men, which sets and hardens to stone, and crushes all beneath it, and that which is white and that which is black are lost equally in the grey of it." In my own words, the novel was a wonderful example of society's failings in the idea that equality is always something good. Equality is not always a neccesarily good thing, such as in the cases of extreme socialism and communism, and when men are truly equal, no one can be exceptional, no one can exert their talents to their full extent, lest they exceed past the established norm.

Fahrenheit 451

I believe Fahrenheit 451 is a great example of a negative utopia, even though the genre of dystopias can be rather preachy and over-done. One of the best symbols from this book is Beatty. Beatty is obviously a self loathing man; his life's work being the burning of books and yet he seems to be one of the most well-read people in the entire novel, quoting Shakespeare and the Bible to prove his points. Montag even had dreams where he and Beatty had arguments, both of them avidly quoting ancient and long burned authors and poets, shouting line after line of incinerated literature, showing us that even he can see the captain's true nature.
Montag and Beatty, prior to the very end of the novel, seemed to clash entirely with their ideology. Montag discovers, with the help of the enigmatic Clarisse McClellan, that there is more to life than burning books, more to existing than making an example of the scholar. Prior to meeting Clarisse his work had been a spectacle, he, and the other fireman, were nothing but a roman circus for the mindless masses of 'gilded fools'. But after his brief relationship with Clarisse he had come to see the true meaning of his work and of his life. He had come to see that his purpose in society was to keep intelligence from the people, to make them stupefied masses that were filled with nothing but facts and useless memorization. Beatty, too, had come to see that this was all he was doing, not protecting them from clashing ideas but keeping them dull and utterly ignorant. We, as the readers, are not aware of when he had come to see this but it is blatantly obvious being as Beatty continually spouts lines from literature and does not cling to his parlor and 'family', nor does he wear the seashell radios that seem oh so popular with the modern man.
This novel is very near the epitome of a dystopia; nearly on par with Orwell's 1984. The masses in the society of Fahrenheit, however, seem to be the ones that brought about the demise of literature and independent thought. Unlike in many dystopias wherein the government forces their doctrines upon the people, in Fahrenheit the people themselves are the ones that caused their subjugation. The government of Bradbury's world only stepped in to enforce the banning of books after the mass media had taken hold of the citizens, pushing any desire for books from their minds and bringing their self-imposed dementia to bear. This itself is a remarkable symbol, criticizing modern society's rapidly expanding need for the mass media and its immersion in information. Bradbury's novel merely expands upon this, exaggerating it, although believably, to show the depth of our growing addiction.
"What traitors books can be! You think they're backing you up, and they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives." -- Captain Beatty.

Captain Beatty says this to Montag in order to try and disuade him from making the same mistakes he himself had made. Beatty had explained to Montag that he had tried to slide-rule and measure the universe but to no avail, that trying to understand and equate what it is to be was utterly impossible. Beatty's own attempts to understand the universe have never come to fruition which leads him to believe it's impossible to do so. The entire novel has an air of utter despair due to the characters' lack of understanding. The novel gave me a feeling that without literature, or even the possibility of reading and comprehending literature, the world would be peopled by ignorant masses of media-addicted, violent dunces. The depressing nature of this understanding of the meaning of the work is enough to make you want to get your hands on, and read every book you can, abosorbing its knowledge and words into yourself so that it would never be forgotten.