Analysis of Coketown

Coketown is a fictional city. It is a product of Charles Dickens, who was a novelist of Victorian Age. Right from the name of the town the novelist focuses attention on coke that is a fuel. The passage belongs to the novel "HARD TIMES" . The novel is a narrative renderling of the philosophy of Utilitarianism, by J.Bentham. It underlines the material approach to life adopted in the period. With an interesting use of language and syntax Charles Dickens returns to the reader an alienated vision of Coketown. Charles Dickens  adopts a third person omniscient intrusive narrator. He privileges the technique of “telling “ and the first idea of the town the narrator provides the reader with is that Coketown was a "triumph of fact" implies there was no space for fancy. The description given to the reader is highly metonymical (it was a town of red brick). The use of colours made by narrator is symbolical: red and black. Also the idea of pollution is expressed by frequent references to smoke and ash. Talking about town's colour narrator uses the adjective “unnatural red”, so the narrator highlights how human beings are compared to live disregarding. The architecture surrounding them does not show any creativity: every building is exactly like the other. To sum up the effect the narrator uses a simily: he tells that Coketowns reminds him " the painted face of a savage". Again the intelligent reader can see the artificial effect of man-made construction. The choice of the word savage focuses once more the attention on the absence of civilization. The simily used is meant for the reader to create a more detailed mind picture. In addition the narrator refers to the system of production( the industrialization process): he tells about machinery and chimneys and in order to describe the process of production he draws the attention of the reader to the smoke that symbolically has got the shape of "the painted face of a savage and interminable snakes”. Language is used to convey a negative vision of the town. In addition the choice of the snake coming straightforward from the religious code underlines what Dickens thinks about the Victorian system of production. Instead of said the people are alienated he depries his description of the presence of any human being, so that he implicitly slice that personal identity is luxury that people in Coketown couldn't afford. The town significally becomes its uniform architetturing of machinery. Therefore he focuses reader’s attention on the noise of the system of production. Readers are involved in the reading process by the use of the language of impressions ( the narrator makes you see, smell, heard ). The use of onomatopoeic words like "there was a retelling an the trammeling all day long". Reinforces the idea of a noisy town, and again the narrator describes the emotion of the engine: the steam-engine, that is symbolically described as a machine that "worked monotonously up and down" immediately followed is compared to the simily "like the head of an elephant"  in a state of  "melancholy madness". Charles Dickens exploit a repetitive syntax to recreate the monotony of factory.