MB UNIUD

I am going to analyze the first part of chapter three of Hard Times by Charles Dickens: The Key-Note. Narrator is a third person omniscient narrator. The chapter talks about Coketown, an industrial centre. Coketown is full of smoke, machinery and chimneys, it has a black canal and an ill-smelling river and where people make always the same things and there is only one church. The text says that everything is the same: the streets, people and their work. Dickens compares the "unnatural red and black" of the city and "the painted face of a savage", as a matter of fact Coketown is an unnatural city, and so savages are uncivilized. As a matter of fact we find a comparison between the smoke of the chimneys and serpents and the monotonous work of the steam-engine with the head of an elephant. Probably Dickens used nature in order to underline Coketown uncivilization. This brings to the loss of identity, people are like robots. Finally the text talks about the loss of identity and the repetitiveness that industry brings.