icecit's Full Review: Alexandre Dumas, Karen Holmes, Margaret Brantley, ...
The Count of Monte Cristo is an intriguing story replete with allegories, parallelisms, opulent imagery, clever characters depictions and few moments of inaction. At once, we are swept into the world of Edmond Dantes, an idealistic, young sailor who has his hopes dashed by others who would stand to gain from his misfortune. For fourteen years, the innocent Dantes is imprisoned until he makes his escape and lays claim to the hidden fortune of an Italian aristocratic family that has no heir. Once free, he spends his next years shrewdly executing a clandestine scheme to exact revenge on his enemies until he discovers that his acts of vengeance have unexpected repercussions on those he would not choose to harm.
Several of the characters have well-developed personalities. The main character, Dantes/Count, is well contrasted in his youthful idealistic passionate phase (Dantes) versus the calculating, punctual, cold-hearted phase (Count). Dantes Chateau DIf fellow prisoner, the mad Abbe Faria, is a delight as the cerebral, learned pedagogue in the role of a foil to Dantes physical, naive student. Further, Faria, in his concocted madness, is a perfect bridge for Dantes to mature from youthful idealist into canny (sur)realist. Dantes accomplishes this transformation under Faria's tutelage and is the beneficiary of the Abbe's wisdom, vision and humanity. However, so deep are Dantes' wounds that the transformation is imperfect allowing for the hate/love theme to propagate and permeate the balance of the novel, only finally completing post climax, in denouement.
Albert, the son of Mercedes and Fernand serves well as the 'second coming of Dantes'. Albert displays youthful selfish exuberance, bravery and passion in our introduction to him during his Italian excursion. His own transformation from a boy to a man continues under the Count's watchful eye in Paris consummates with the dual and its epilogue. Nortier is also a clever creation as the paralyzed savant. The nonverbal communication with eye movement and expression was a terrific and powerful metaphor for 'a picture is worth a thousand words'. (Hmm...a particularly delicious inside joke against the voluminous tome???) Fernand, Carderousse, Danglars, de Villefort are counterpoints as villains with respectively increasing degrees of interest. There are some other cliched characters that are used effectively in the architecture of the story (i.e., Vampa, Mme. Danglars, Valentine, Maximillian, Morrel, inn-keeper in Italy)
Dumas utilization of Mercedes to connote 'hope' in the fabric of the story is sublime. As the love interest, she is the lightening rod for the impassioned, imprisoned Dantes. She showcases her weakness / acquiesance in marrying someone she did not love (Fernand) which serves as a key source of Dantes' angst. Even so, she never directly becomes a target of revenge herself. Although she is aware that all around her are falling to the willful malice of Dantes/Count, she maintains her silence in waiting. When her two loves prepare to engage in a dual, she intercedes and offers a humiliating life-saving choice for all. Her decision to create the artifice of imprisonment of self-loathing / lamenting the loss of young Dantes serves to keep 'hope' alive. The Dantes/Mercedes non-union re-enforces this loss in the reader.
Morrel and Franz are two other interesting characters; however, as a con there are too many characters requiring more development than the story can reasonably maintain (even in 500 odd pages).
In life, good and evil are intermingled thus rendering a cycle of discomfort and release. In this story, as readers, the passion we feel is palpable and often contrary to social conscience causing us to agonize for closure, yet being expected to: hope and wait.
The Count of Monte Cristo , by Alexandre Dumas , is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to ...More at Barnes & Noble.com
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