The Count of Monte Cristo Literary Devices

Explanation and Analysis—The Politics of Death:

In Chapter 12, Noirtier and Villefort discuss the tensions between Royalist and Bonapartist factions in France and the recent death of a general, seemingly at the hands of Noirtier's Bonapartist associates, that the King of France himself identified as a murder. In a moment of foreshadowing, Noirtier reflects on the role of murder in politics:

The king! I thought him enough of a philosopher to realize that there is no such thing as murder in politics. You know as well as I do, my dear boy, that in politics there are no people, only ideas; no feelings, only interests. In politics, you don’t kill a man, you remove an obstacle, that’s all.

Ruthlessness, it would appear, runs in the family. By using metaphor to compare humans to mere obstacles—obstacles to be "removed"—in political struggle, Noirtier shows his son exactly what he thinks about the value of human life. This exchange foreshadows Villefort's eventual treatment of Dantès: by casting him aside as a prisoner and conspiring to ruin his life in order to protect his family's political reputation, it would seem that Villefort takes his father's words to heart.

The nature of justice and the effects of proper and improper applications of justice lie at the center of The Count of Monte Cristo. As a member of France's judiciary, Villefort's willingness to suspend any notion of justice in favor of personal gain is a particularly stark violation of his honor, and his cruelty towards Dantès leads directly to the creation of the Count of Monte Cristo as an arbiter of the new, revenge-fueled kind of justice that becomes the Count's hallmark and Villefort's undoing.

Explanation and Analysis—The Power of the Storm:

In Chapter 15, Dantès reflects on his former life that he enjoyed before being stripped of his humanity and heartlessly imprisoned by Villefort's machinations against him. He uses a potent combination of personification, simile, and metaphor as he ruminates on his seafaring days as a young sailor:

‘Sometimes,’ he thought at such moments, ‘in my distant voyages, when I was still a man—and when that man, free and powerful, gave orders to others that they carried out—I used to see the sky open, the sea tremble and groan, a storm brewing in some part of the sky and thrashing the horizon with its wings like a giant eagle; then I would feel that my vessel was nothing but a useless refuge, itself shaking and shuddering, as light as a feather in the hand of a giant.'

In Dantès's memory, the sky becomes human through personification as it trembles and groans, the storm that brews within the sky transforms into an eagle through simile, and the boat becomes a feather in the hand of a giant through metaphor. In this former life, Dantès felt small—helpless, utterly beholden to the forces that brewed around him, incapable of self-determination. As he transforms into the Count, he will learn to bend the world to his will and become a force of nature in his own right.

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Explanation and Analysis—A Failure of Imagination:

In Chapter 15, Dumas relates the extent of Dantès's predicament as he sits in prison in terms of that which Dantès does not know: uneducated as he is, Dantès has no means to entertain himself with knowledge of literature or memory of historical anecdotes. Dumas articulates this plight with a series of literary devices, including visual imagery, metaphor, and an allusion to the vividness of oil painting:

Dantès was a simple, uneducated man; to him, the past was covered by a murky veil that can be raised only by knowledge. In the solitude of his dungeon and the desert of his thoughts, he could not reconstruct ages past, revive extinct races or rebuild those antique cities that imagination augments and poeticizes so that they pass before one’s eyes, gigantic and lit by fiery skies, as in Martin’s Babylonian scenes. All he had were: his own past, which was so short; his present – so sombre; and his future – so uncertain: nineteen years of light to contemplate, in what might be eternal darkness!

Dumas uses metaphor to compare the act of remembering the past and anticipating the future to attempting to look through a haze or a veil—the object of sight is obscured through the opacity of time. He also invokes the English artist John Martin, a Romantic painter who would have been a contemporary of Dumas, to demonstrate the power of a well-educated imagination: had Dantès known more, he might be able to conjure scenes in his head like those of Martin's massive paintings of biblical events.

By demonstrating Dantès's lack of education and refinement, Dumas foreshadows the forthcoming crash-course in cultural and military knowledge and aristocratic behavior that he will receive from the Abbe—the very education that will enable him to transform into the Count of Monte Cristo. Dantès will leave the prison capable not only of imagining a wild future for himself but also with the power to make that future into reality.

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Explanation and Analysis—Noirtier's Inner Light:

In Chapter 58, Dumas invites the reader into a conversation with Noirtier, the old Monsieur de Villefort himself—an apparently ancient man who has lost the power of speech and movement but nonetheless retains his presence of mind. Dumas introduces Noirtier with a slew of literary devices, including hyperbole, metaphor, simile, and the imagery of light and darkness:

Motionless as a corpse, he greeted his children with bright, intelligent eyes .... Sight and hearing were the only two senses which, like two sparks, still lit up this human matter, already three-quarters remoulded for the tomb. Moreover, only one of these two senses could reveal to the outside world the inner life which animated this statue, and the look which disclosed that inner life was like one of those distant lights which shine at night, to tell a traveller in the desert that another being watches in the silence and the darkness.

Though Noirtier cannot move, Dumas conveys his "inner light" in a wash of visual imagery: his "bright" eyes, like "sparks," light Noirtier up from within. Dumas then uses hyperbole to convey just how close to the grave Noirtier appears to be—"three-quarters" on the way, to be exact, his body well en-route to some sort of self-mummification turning him from human being to metaphorical "statue."

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Explanation and Analysis—In the Beginning, Was Me!:

In Chapter 89, Mercédès finally declares the Count to be Edmond Dantès, her betrothed from all those years ago. In a flourish of hyperbole, the Count can finally reveal the extent of his quest for revenge:

What would you say if you knew the extent of the sacrifice I am making for you? Suppose that the Lord God, after creating the world, after fertilizing the void, had stopped one-third of the way through His creation to spare an angel the tears that our crimes would one day bring to His immortal eyes. Suppose that [...] God had extinguished the sun and with His foot dashed the world into eternal night [...]

In answer to Mercédès, who wonders why he must seek revenge from Albert as well, the Count lets slip the full extent of his grandiose ambitions: he sees himself like God, with his quest for revenge akin to God's plan to create the world itself. For the Count to stop short of his plan for Albert's sake would be like God stopping one-third of the way through Creation for the sake of one angel. This is the most explicit parallel between the Count and God in the Count of Monte Cristo, despite other hints throughout the novel that the Count sees his mission in these divine terms. The role of God's will in the Count's redemption process and the role of revenge in the attempt to seek justice are major themes in The Count of Monte Cristo, and this passage leaves no doubt that, at least in this moment, the Count sees himself on a divinely-ordained path to justice that relies exclusively on ruthless revenge.

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Explanation and Analysis—The Angel Valentine:

After Valentine's presumed death, various characters mourn her passing. In Chapter 103, Villefort shares news of her death with Maximilien, who is devastated and reveals his love for her. As Villefort learns of Maximilien's affections, he uses a metaphor to compare Valentine to an angel:

You see, the angel for whom you longed has left this earth. She no longer needs the adoration of men— she, who, at this moment, is adoring the Lord. So say your farewells, Monsieur, to these sad remains that she has left behind among us.

Biblical references abound in The Count of Monte Cristo, and here Villefort displays a devout sense of Christian faith that feels especially performative. The reader has seen, time and again, the extent to which Villefort cares about how he is perceived by French society, and this passage may be no exception. The great irony of Villefort's mournful speech, of course, is that Valentine does not die—the Count saves her life. By observing that Valentine is "adoring the Lord," then, Villefort has made an unwitting comparison between "the Savior" of Christian faith and Valentine's actual savior, the Count himself. Yet again, in this passage Dumas subtly ascribes Biblical proportions to the Count's quest and character.

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Explanation and Analysis—The Rhetoric of Eulogy:

In Chapter 105, the funeral for Valentine takes place at the Père Lachaise cemetery. In Dumas's account, a series of rhetorically masterful but emotionally empty eulogies follow that lavish Valentine with praise for supposedly upholding justice on behalf of the criminals her father, Villefort, would prosecute. The eulogies make heavy use of irony and metaphor:

Some had been found who were ingenious enough to have discovered that the young woman had more than once implored M. de Villefort on behalf of guilty men over whose head the sword of justice was suspended.

This observation is rife with verbal irony. Not only is Valentine alive, but Dumas certainly does not mean to praise the "genius" of these mourners. Their "discovery" of Valentine's good deeds, that is to say, is a fabrication made for the sake of appealing to the emotion of the moment. Mimicking the melodrama of the speeches themselves, Dumas mocks the speakers with an overwrought metaphor: justice transforms into a sword suspended like an executioner's blade over the heads of the guilty. Playful or not, this is a loaded comparison, given that the highly corrupt Villefort wields his legal practice like a weapon against his enemies—including the Count himself, who just so happens to wield both figurative and literal swords of his own against everyone who wronged him. In The Count of Monte Cristo, justice is not an abstract idea but rather something to be used, something to wield, something to execute.

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Explanation and Analysis—Storm Mentality:

In Chapter 107, Dumas takes the reader to the prison known as the Lion's Pit—where Andrea has found himself incarcerated, despite his insistence on his royal pedigree. Dumas uses metaphor to convey the effect that Andrea's boasting has on his fellow prisoners:

The thieves looked at one another, muttering under their breath; and a storm, raised by the warder’s provocation even more than by Andrea’s words, began to rumble around the aristocratic prisoner. The warder, sure of doing a quos ego when the waves began to rise too high, let the storm brew a little to play a trick on the man who had been importuning him and to give himself a little light relief in a tedious day’s work. The thieves had already come close to Andrea, and some were shouting: ‘The slipper! The slipper!’

As the other thieves mutter among themselves, a metaphorical "storm" begins to "brew"—their discontent transforms into a violent, taunting rebuke of Andrea and his falsified pretensions. Throughout the Count of Monte Cristo, events that Dumas deems to be—or wants to be—inevitable are frequently characterized in the metaphorical language of stormy weather. Storms become a convenient motif to represent everything from the turmoil of humanity's inner life to the potentially disastrous effects of mob mentality. In literature, storms are also traditional omens of impending disaster—their appearance generates a sense of sinister apprehension.

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Explanation and Analysis—The Urban Sea:

In Chapter 112, the Count prepares—at last—to leave Paris. Before doing so, he takes one last look at the majesty of the city, spread out below him from his vantage point on a hill in the commune of Villejuif just outside the city proper. Dumas uses a metaphor of the ocean to depict the lights of Paris in the dark of night:

They were at the top of the Montée de Villejuif, on the plateau from which Paris is a dark sea shimmering with millions of lights like phosphorescent waves; and waves they are, more thunderous, more passionate, more shifting, more furious and more greedy than those of the stormy ocean, waves which never experience the tranquillity of a vast sea, but constantly pound together, ever foaming and engulfing everything!

Paris unfolds before the Count, and Dumas transforms it into a violent, stormy sea—an exciting, enthralling sort of restlessness even more tempestuous than the sea itself, thanks to the tremendous "passions" which erupt in cities of humankind. In the closing chapters of The Count of Monte Cristo, as the Count reflects on his quest toward vengeance and his impending departure from that world, Dumas begins to make larger, sweeping observations such as this one that show the Count's vision of humanity—and continues the strain of stormy sea imagery and metaphor that pervade the novel. From the Count's perspective, there is an inevitability to the passion and intrigue that lead to this endless tumult. After spending decades battered about by these 'waves', however, he has finally managed to rise above them.

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The Count of Monte Cristo

Alexandre Dumas

The Count of Monte Cristo: Metaphors 9 key examples