"Of all these cries, and ten thousand incoherencies, ‘The Prisoners’ was the cry most taken up by the sea that rushed in, as if there were an eternity of people, as well as of time and space” (225).
This paragraph emphasizes both the amount of people rebelling and the fact that their main concern was to right the wrongs done to the imprisoned. Their foremost call was to free the prisoners trapped inside of the Bastille as a result of the nobility's cruelty. This connects the motif of imprisonment with the peasants' hatred of the aristocracy. The nobles are the judges, juries, and exocutioners of the peasants; by tearing down this icon of aristocratic power, the third estate eliminates the hold nobles have over them. Thus, the motif of imprisonment is important because throughout the book, those with power imprison those without. When the peasants rebel, they imprison the nobles and show that they are in power.
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3 comments:
Thats a really great quote to choose.
I also think Dickens "Eternity of space and time" piece is big.
His idea is that when one imprisons wrongly, it will come back, and if ignored long enough, in the bloodiest and grandest of fashions.
This quote is made even more significant by what came before it.
The peasants chose between destroying the weapons of torture, the Records room, or taking revenge right away on more guards. They chose the prisoners above all else.
I noticed what hemanth did, but then I started to think about what the peasants' "slogan" is. They are for the country and their people. This quote further demonstrated that their first order of business is to free all their people and the repetition of "Prisoners!" shows that they are most important and will put them first.
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