A Tale of Two Cities/ Charles Dickens
In the novel A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens parallelism is introduced in the famed first paragraph and is used to exhibit the themes of class struggles, secrets, and imprisonment. Dickens uses parallelism to further introduce themes while developing the story also.
The use of parallelism helped explain the class struggles by repeating and telling all the hardships, such as hunger, that the French had to go through. It also displayed the effects it had on the people of France.
“It was prevalent everywhere. Hunger was pushed out of the tall houses, in wretched that hung upon poles and lines; Hunger was patched into them with straw and rag and wood and paper; Hunger was repeated in every fragment of the small modicum of firewood that the man sawed off; Hunger stared down from the smokeless chimneys, and started up from filthy street that had no offal, among its refuse, of eating anything. Hunger was the inscription on the baker’s shelves, written in every small loaf of his scanty stock of bad bread; at the sausage-shop, in every dead-dog preparation that was offered for sale. Hunger rattled at its dry bones among the roasting chestnuts in the turned cylinder; Hunger was shred into atomies in every farthing porringer of husky chips of potato, fried with some reluctant drops of oil.” (Dickens 28)
Dickens’ first statement begins with how hunger was all around and he then proceeds with starting each sentence with hunger and all of its effects. Dickens wrote “ Hunger was patched into them with straw and rag and wood and paper; Hunger was repeated in every fragment of the small modicum of firewood that the man sawed off:” Here is an example of repetition of hunger which is what parallelism is. The repetition helped support the bringing across of class struggles in France. The quote also showed that hunger was with them in whatever they do. The excerpt suggested hunger in every different way and that itself...