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How Does Sydney Carton Change In A Tale Of Two Cities

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In The Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, the most dynamic and central character of the story is Sydney Carton, who helps serve as the catalyst for one of the book’s major themes, that love requires sacrifice.
Character development is a huge part of how Sydney will eventually experience loss for the sake of love. Sydney Carton is a complicated individual. He is described as the “idlest, and most uncompromising of men”( 1.5.65). He is extremely intelligent, but a drunkard and unmotivated with his life. Carton needs a purpose for his “wasted life”, and this comes about in the form of the beautiful, but static, Lucie Manette. However, Lucie is in love with Charles Darnay, a fact that Sydney knows quite well. When he first sees Lucie in court, her purity …show more content…

He describes this as, “waters of Hope that sparkled in his sight . . . A moment, and it was gone” (1.5.68). This sense of hope shows what Lucie means to him. However, when Carton wakes up, he feels empty; “no sadder than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away” (1.5.69) because he knows she could never return the feeling. At the beginning of the novel, Sydney Carton is the less than desirable mirror image of Charles Darnay, whom he is defending on a trial. Later he tells his doppelganger; “I am a disappointed drudge, sir. I care for no man on earth, and no man on earth cares for me”(2.4.70). Sydney is so full of disgust for himself, seeing a man who should be his equal, but is far above him shames him even more. This thought controls Sydney’s life; he believes that because of how unwanted and pathetic he is, no one else could ever love him. He even tells Lucie this himself; “Let me carry through the rest of my misdirected life, the remembrance that I opened my heart

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