Samantha Melchor
Mrs. Baker
IB English HL – period 2
12 January 2015
Anna Karenina Scavenger Hunt
A seemingly random event, object or circumstance that takes on symbolic significance and is regarded as an omen:
The bearded peasant
In Part IV chapters II and III Anna and Vronsky’s strikingly similar dreams about a “small and dirty [peasant] with a tangled beard… [Speaking] incomprehensible words [in French]” is an omen linked with Anna’s death (Tolstoy 324). When Anna formally meets Vronsky at the train station in Part I, a peasant appears on the train station platform carrying a sack at the same time the man dies at the train station. The peasant’s association with trains and death foreshadows Anna’s suicide. When Anna goes at the train…show more content… After terrible pain and a sensation as if something enormous, bigger than his whole head, were being pulled out of his jaw, he feels, scarcely believing in his happiness, that the thing which has so long been poisoning his life and engrossing his attention no longer exists, and that it is possible again to live, think, and be interested in other things” (Tolstoy 254). Here, the toothache is a metaphor for Karenin’s suspicion of Anna’s infidelity, and the extraction of the tooth represents when he finally knows of it. Karenin truly did love Anna, so the constant obsession of knowing whether or not she was being faithful to him was taking over his life, as well as taking on a life of its own. That type of pain is uncomfortable and seeps through to your whole head, just as a horrible toothache would. Once the tooth causing the problem is removed, or once Karenin finds out Anna has been romantically involved with another man, the pain is somewhat relived but there is still a hole left in its place which brings a different kind of pain that will last for a long
