Examples Of Imprisonment In A Tale Of Two Cities

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The Prisoners of A Tale of Two Cities
In A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, imprisonment is a major motif used to develop characters. In the book imprisonment is not just physical but also metaphorical. As said by Thornton Wilder “Imprisonment of the body is bitter; imprisonment of the mind is worse.” Wilder is saying that when the mind has been restrained a person’s abilities to think freely have been destroyed. The book has three main examples of imprisonment which are Sydney Carton, Charles Darnay, and Doctor Manette. In A Tale of Two Cities, not all of the characters are physically locked away but are confined by other things, such as alcohol and their mind, that do not allow them to live a fully free life to the best of their ability.
In the book Doctor Manette had been in prison for 18 years of his life. Manette is mentally damaged and trapped in his own mind because he believes he cannot abandon his routine of shoemaking. “The faintness of the voice was pitiable and dreadful. It was not the faintness of physical weakness, though confinement and hard work fare no doubt had their part in it. Its deplorable peculiarity was, that it was the faintness of solitude and disuse” (Dickens 35). The way Dickens describes the miserable time Doctor Manette is going through creates a sense of …show more content…
The use of imprisonment helps to shape the characters through the hardships and emotions they express and cause during the course of the book. In Sydney Carton’s case the imprisonment is mentally which creates sympathy from the reader. Likewise, Doctor Manette was also imprisoned by his own mind and physically in 105 North Tower of the Bastille. Charles Darnay was imprisoned physically within the walls of La Force. At the end of A Tale of Two Cities all of the characters that were imprisoned, physically or mentally, reached tranquility with

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