Tale of Two Cities Quote Analasys

Pg.21 chapter 3

"A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other... that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imagin-ings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this."

The narrator makes this reflection at the beginning of Book the First, Chapter 3, After Jerry Cruncher delivers a cryptic message to Jarvis Lorry in the darkened mail coach. Lorry's mission--to recover the long-imprisoned Doctor Manette and "recall" him to life--establishes the essential dilemma that he and other characters face: that is, that human beings constitute long-lasting mysteries to one another and always remain somewhat locked away, never fully reachable by outside thinking. This basic mystery is very obvious in the case of Manette, whose private sufferings force him to relapse throughout the novel into periods of cobbling, a job that he first took up in jail. Throughout the novel, Manette mentally returns to his prison, bound more by his own memories than by any attempt of the other characters to "recall" him into the present time. This passage's reference to death also evokes the deep secret revealed in Carton's self-sacrifice at the end of the novel. The exact profundity of his love and devotion for Lucie remains obscure until he commits to dying for her husband; the self-sacrifice of his death left me wondering at the ways in which he might have manifested this great love in life.