Analysis of the extract Coketown

The extract is taken from the fifth chapter of Charles Dicken's Hard Times . It is made up by a long description of the industrial city "Coketown".

The narrator is a third person omniscient and intrusive one. He knows everything about the place, whose name reminds to the fuel used in factories to have the production process work.

The situation described is an alienated one; indeed, the narrator focuses his attention on how the material side of things was considered more important than the human one.

Firstly, the narrator involves the reader by sense impressions, related especially to the sight. The dominant colors are red, the color of the blood, and the dark color typical of smoke and dust. Using these kind of references the narrator is using the metonymic effect, according to which he describes the town in its effects.

The color red is defined as "unnatural" and it is compared to a " painted face of a savage". These adjectives cause an immediate response to the reader who understands that there is something wrong in the city and make the city turning out as something unnatural and artificial because of the productive process, which does not allowed the place to guarantee to his citizens an healthy lifestyle. Then, the word " savage" recalls the idea of Jean Jacques Rousseau ,who defined savage as people with no culture and no civilization.

In describing the city, the novelist exploits the power of the language and he renders it in a metonymical way, without any eference to his proper inhabitants.

Secondly, Mr Dickens focuses his attention on the description of the smoke coming out from the chimneys which is described as serpents; these animal is the same one that tempted Eve Eden's Garden. The allusion, lead the reader to reflect on the idea of knowledge, a need that condemned the ancestors Adam and Eve.

The productive process described is going on all day. This means that the smoke trails people every time: they cannot even hope to breathe some healthy air and oxygen.

Even the black canal is something unnatural because it is an artificial channel, it does not belong to nature.

All what is described is anthropomorphized.

The description moves from the distant to the specific, from the general to the peculiar.

As it had been said before the novelist appeals to the sight responses, but also to the hearing with the onomatopoeic sounds of machinery that seem to have no ending and to the smelling ( with reference to " ill-smelling"). From this description the narrator make up an idea of suffocation and of no possibility to breathe.

Pistons going up and down, the auditory level, the shape of chimneys recall the sexual act as a human instinct so without any love feeling.

The image is  that of a poor architectural design of the town in which even people have become one as another. The place is an
alienated one, where everything is the same, even the noise! The icon of the eternal repetition is built on repetitive actions, architectural style,people's lifes.

The metaphors used suggest that the place seems to be a place for animals and what's worst there seems to be no possibility of change.

The second sequence is devoted to a metaphorical description of work, whose importance isnever put into doubt because it sustains the town. Even inside the religious buildings  a great quantity of goods is stored. The only exception is the New Church; indeed, it is described and rest.

As people were all the same, even the public inscription and the town hall haven't got any sign of distinction. The only thing considered important was " fact". The immaterial side was considered more t5han the human and inner one. Even the
personalities and the feelings were lost: the only thing people focused on was fact.