Coketown by Charles Dickens, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica Coketown by Charles Dickens e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! COKETOWN Dickens' first word makes immediately clear the setting: COKETOWN. The word coke takes the reader attention, the reader expect the text to be about industrialization. He provides an apparently positive judgment by describing it as a triumph of fact.. To tell the truth though it's just a pretext to create a contrast with the absence of fancy, a contrast that reminds to the double face of the Industrial Revolution. The introduction refers to two characters Messers. Bouderdy and Gradgrind who are walking towards the town. The narrator is a third person omniscient intrusive narrator and he influences the reader. After having given a realistic description of the town, Dickens describes the city from a materialistic point of view by using sense impression. The first sense he appeals to is sigh. The reader can imagine a town of unnatural black and red. With this sentence the narrator creates the idea of a damned city, the city of Hell. In addition by using the similarity like the painted face of a savage he underlines, one more time, the artificial and false nature of the town. As the narrator goes on explaining where the unnatural comes from, the image of coketown becomes more concrete. He keeps using senses to describe the brutality and sadness that were affecting not only the landscape but people and the society. He refers to the religious code. Indeed, he uses the image of interminable serpents to represent the smoke that comes out from the chimneys, serpents which, in a puritan society, like the one he was living in, symbolize the devil. It was because of those reptiles that the canal was black and the river purple and smelly: they create pollution which destroys the nature as well as industrialization destroys society. Moreover, the verbs rattling and trembling, which appeal to the sense of hearing and the onomatopoeically sound of the pistons, that go up and down all day long give the reader a clear image of the monotony of worker's lives. This image is reinforced by the anaphoric use of the adjective same (same hours, same sounds, same pavements, same work). With this brief description, Dickens creates an obsessive and suffocated atmosphere that perfectly embraces the reality of that time. All this, he adds, was in opposition with all the comforts and elegancies that were spreading all over the world. But he judges the Victorian society he's living in full of fine ladies, who could scarcely bear to hear the place mentioned; in few words where all that really matters is appearance. In the fourth paragraph the narrator keeps the reader's attention on monotony and sadness of town life. In a industrialized town everything looked the same. The idea of oppression and rush is conveyed by the anaphoric repetition of the word fact.. Fact reminds to something that has been done by someone and so it's artificial and unnatural. Dickens uses this technique to inform the intelligent reader that there is no room for change, there is any hope. People have lost their personality, there isn’t the idea of identity. In the fifth paragraph, the narrator openly criticizes an initially triumphant town only sacred to fact to underline the importance of appearance and the totally absence of values of the society he was living in. Nevertheless he makes the reader participant by posing him a question and making him feel like he was there, in the 18th century Coketown. As Dickens goes on, the atmosphere becomes more real. The detailed description of the city on a Sunday morning it's nothing more than sad. It suggests the possession and monotony of people's life. the narrator uses the repetition of the possessive adjective own (own quarter, own close rooms, own streets). Nothing changes, even on Sundays despite some more drunk people (either religious or not): that's how common people lived. All this mix of desperation, sadness, madness, monotony is finally put in contrasts with Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Bounderby, the two characters previously met. The few lines Dickens reserves them at the very end of the paragraph may be seen as the little portion of society they represented: the bad face. They were wealthy gentlemen, never thankful and eternally dissatisfied and unmanageable. In his conclusion, the narrator uses the two men as a pretext to critics his society a one, as already understood, full of contradiction by starting with people themselves; a one where nothing was more important than appearance; a one where human beings were less important than facts. Another meaning is that the power of England came with a price and people pretended not to see because they were interested in money. The buildings are all alike, except for the New church and the signs are all in black and white (it states that they tried to keep everything under control).