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Dramatic Irony
Volume 1, Book 2: The Fall
Explanation and Analysis—Number 24601:
Even though the plot of Jean Valjean's story begins chronologically with his arrival at the Bishop's home, it is necessary to provide context for his character. With a flashback, the story depicts Jean Valjean's suffering and hardening through his 19 years in prison:
Then still sobbing, he raised his right hand and lowered it gradually seven times, as though he were touching in succession seven heads of unequal heights, and from this gesture it was divined that the thing which he had done, whatever it was, he had done for the sake of clothing and nourishing seven little children. He set out for Toulon. He arrived there, after a journey of twenty-seven days, on a cart, with a chain on his neck. At Toulon he was clothed in the red cassock. All that had constituted his life, even to his name, was effaced; he was no longer even Jean Valjean; he was number 24601.
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Volume 2, Book 1: Waterloo
Explanation and Analysis—The Battle of Waterloo:
In the first book of Volume 2, the narrator takes a reprieve from Jean Valjean's adventure. Using a flashback, the story follows Napoleon Bonaparte's defeat and contextualizes the current fate of Europe:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Let us turn back, that is one of the storyteller’s rights, and put ourselves once more in the year 1815, and even a little earlier than the epoch when the action narrated in the first part of this book took place. If it had not rained in the night between the 17th and the 18th of June, 1815, the fate of Europe would have been different. A few drops of water, more or less, decided the downfall of Napoleon. All that Providence required in order to make Waterloo the end of Austerlitz was a little more rain, and a cloud traversing the sky out of season sufficed to make a world crumble.
Related Themes:
