Past and Present in Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities: Time as Playing a Functional Role

Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities is a historical novel whose background is the French Revolution. But it has been disputed over its historicity because the stream of time is somewhat distorted. This paper argues that the Revolution is a mere background, and that time, especially the past and the present, plays a functional role in leading to the last scene heavily loaded with powerful emotional catharsis. All the characters in the novel live their present lives encroached with past memories, and there is no way out of this state. The only way the novel suggests is a violent, destructive twist of fate, which is embodied in Sydney Carton’s sacrificial death for Charles Darney in the level of the plot, and which is materialized in the ambiguity toward the time stream in the level of the narrative. The French Revolution is used as a background not for its historical meaning, but for the atmosphere of violence and destructiveness that it arouses. A Tale of Two Cities distinctively features the emotional effects of the historical event rather than its historical meanings. (Chungnam National University)