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Setting
Definition of Simile
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often use the connecting words "like" or "as," but can also... read full definition
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often use the connecting words "like... read full definition
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often... read full definition
Chapter 5 – The Betrothal
Explanation and Analysis—Dantès's Betrothal:
In Chapter 5, as Dumas begins to set the plot of his novel in motion, the reader comes to the dawning realization that the world might be out to get Dantès. In keeping with the frequent use of storm and water imagery to intensify the narrative, Dumas raises the suspense of Dantès's betrothal dinner by using a storm simile to focus on Fernand's obvious hostility towards Dantès and foreshadow the coming plot against the young captain. While Dantès himself remains quite oblivious to the threat, the reader cannot help but see it unfold before them in a heap of dramatic irony:
Fernand was shuffling on his chair, starting at the slightest noise and, from time to time, wiping large beads of sweat from his forehead, which seemed to have fallen there like the first drops of rain before a storm.
‘By heaven, neighbour,’ said Dantès, ‘[...] It’s true, Mercédès is not yet my wife, but [...] in an hour and a half, she will be!’
There was a gasp of surprise from everyone, except Old Dantès, who exhibited his fine set of teeth in a broad laugh. Mercédès smiled [...]. Fernand made a convulsive lunge towards the handle of his dagger.
Dumas foreshadows the precariousness of Dantès's situation with the simile linking the drops of sweat on Fernand's brow to the first drop of rain in a storm—just as the first moments of rain anticipate a downpour, Fernand's demeanor anticipates a great ordeal for Dantès. Danglers, meanwhile, relies on Fernand's frenetic behavior and evident jealousy over Dantès's coming wedding as a cover so that he can set in motion the true plot against Dantès. The reader is left to wonder at the storm of conspiracies converging around Dantès while the man himself is too besotted to notice much of anything at all.
The potent imagery of stormy weather becomes a frequent motif throughout The Count of Monte Cristo, which Dumas invokes in order to connect the events of the novel to the larger, uncontrollable, and unpredictable workings of the world at large—storms, since ancient times, are manifestations of divine wrath and willpower, as gods seemingly call them down from the heavens onto unsuspecting mortals below.
Related Themes:
Chapter 15 – Number 34 and Number 17
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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Chapter 58 – Monsieur Noirtier de Villefort
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."
Chapter 71 – Bread and Salt
Explanation and Analysis—From Malta, With Love:
In Chapter 71, the Count and Mercédès discuss their pasts as they walk around the Morcerf property. In a moment laden with dramatic irony, the Count shares a fabricated tale of a lost love and uses a simile to underscore his loss:
It is not my fault, Madame. In Malta I loved a girl and was going to marry her, when the war came and swept me away from her like a whirlwind. I thought that she loved me enough to wait for me, even to remain faithful to my tomb. When I came back, she was married.
Once again, Dumas uses weather in a literary device to illustrate the force of human struggle: the Count's fictional lover was "swept away" like a "whirlwind." The simile holds true to the emotion behind the Count's falsified backstory—he was, in fact, swept away from Mercédès when he was imprisoned—but does not reveal the Count's identity. For the reader, this moment carries particular suspense. It would appear that Mercédès and the Count both know exactly who the other is, and the Count is not especially careful in sharing a backstory with a one-to-one correlation to his real relationship to Mercédès, but neither character has let anything on. For now, they stick to their assumed identities and carry on the charade.
Dumas uses questions of identity as a propulsive narrative device in The Count of Monte Cristo, drawing out the ambiguity of each character's true identity for as long as possible. By letting the reader stay just a bit more informed than the characters in the story, Dumas can mine the effects of dramatic irony and heighten the reader's feeling of suspense as these long-lost lovers almost reunite. After all, The Count of Monte Cristo is also a love story—and the Count's relationship with Mercédès is a central source of motivation for his rampage of revenge.
Related Themes:
Chapter 80 – The Accusation
Explanation and Analysis—A Fearful Falling Star:
In Chapter 80, the Villefort family continues to crumble after the attempted poisonings of the Saint-Merans and Barrois. At the close of the chapter, Villefort comes to a startling realization about his wife, which Dumas conveys using simile:
How odd it was! For all the confused feelings that he experienced on seeing [Valentine’s] tears, he also managed to observe Mme de Villefort; and it seemed to him that a faint, dark smile passed briefly across her thin lips, like one of those sinister meteors that can be glimpsed as they fall between two clouds against a stormy day.
As this simple smile flits across Mme de Villefort's face, it dawns on Villefort that she could potentially be the architect of this murderous plot, rather than his daughter, Valentine, who he had previously suspected. The simile of a meteor on a stormy day—a fleeting thing, gone as soon as it has appeared—illustrates the impossibly brief duration in which Mme de Villefort reveals her true intentions. Throughout The Count of Monte Cristo, Dumas uses metaphors and similes of stormy weather to explore the tumultuous inner lives of his characters. In this case, however, Mme de Villefort's inner life has revealed itself, disastrously, to her husband.
Chapter 112 – Departure
Explanation and Analysis—The Count's Holy Vocation:
In the closing chapters of The Count of Monte Cristo, the Count attempts to wrap up the many, many loose ends he has accumulated over his decades-long quest for revenge. There's no question that the Count thinks quite highly of his grand plan against those who wronged him in his previous life as Dantès, all those years ago. In Chapter 112, as he reveals the depth of his ambitions to Mercédès, he uses a dramatic simile to convey this sense of grandeur:
From then on, that fortune seemed to me a holy vocation; from then on, there was not one further thought in me for that life, the sweetness of which you, poor woman, have sometimes partaken. Not an hour of calm, not a single hour. I felt myself driven like a cloud of flame through the sky to destroy the cities of the plain.
The Count feels himself to have been, at the height of his quest for justice, like a violent fireball descending toward the cities of the plain. Besides showing the self-destructive nature of the Count's quest that he only begins to appreciate by the end of the novel, this is a likely allusion to the themes of fire and vengeance that pervade the story of the Trojan war as told in Homer's Iliad—in particular recalling Book 21 of the poem, when Hephaestus scorches the legendary plain of the Trojan battlefield with his divine fire and aids the Greek war effort to destroy the city of Troy.
Throughout The Count of Monte Cristo, Dumas makes a concerted effort to raise the gravitas of his plot through dramatic literary devices and frequent invocations of the narratives of classical epic and European literature alike. The Count's subtle allusion to Homer's poetry and comparison of himself to an embodiment of violent, divine wrath vividly associates the drama of Dumas's historical world with the fantastical imagery of Greek myth and reminds the reader—at the very same moment as the Count is coming to this realization himself—that he's too caught up in his own story for his own good.
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