Monte Cristo Hope and Patience

Monte Cristo

Hope and Patience in the Count of Monte Cristo

There is a distinction which may be useful to describe the protagonist of any important literary work that makes as its focus the human experience. If not a hero, the protagonist is an individual whose profound effect on the events and interactions constituting the lives of those in his presence makes his story worthy of recollection. In Alexandre Dumas' preeminent revenge drama the Count of Monte Cristo there is a protagonist who captures this notion. Indeed, Edmond Dantes serves as an example for the singular will to hope which seems to define an individual of such impact. Suffering sudden injustice in spite of his youthful brilliance and wide open opportunities, Dantes is thrust into a deep, despairing darkness to which there is no apparent end. It is thus that his life become a masterpiece of patience and optimism. It is perhaps the case that he is sustained by knowledge, and most certainly true that he is afforded much by the presence of the mentor which he gains in his circumstance. Thus, although Dantes would ultimately grow to be men of considerable success and importance, capable of gaining that which desires upon design and whim, he is a man molded by a combination hope and waiting. Thus, when at the resolution of the novel his revenge leaves him empty, this is the only resolution in which we may gain comfort. Where he expresses man's obligation simply to 'wait and hope,' he offers quite simply the philosophy which helped to deliver him from permanent darkness to an ultimately luxuriant existence.

As the protegee of Abbe Faria, Dantes undergoes a transition that will essentially render nonexistent the innocent and ignorant young man who enters the Chateau d'if. With no way to pass the hours of his days but to learn, Dantes' time in prison is spent amassing the power of wisdom. The brilliant Faria is not simply essential to initiating an education that would shape the boy into a hardened man but also for endowing him with the wisdom to see the truth of his situation. A former political dissident himself, Faria has an intuition not afforded to his young prison-mate. But as he helps Dantes to understand the plot which had him incarcerated, he provokes a change which will shape the direction of the rest of the novel. In recognition of that change, Faria tells Dantes that "I regret now,... having helped you in your late inquiries, or having given you the information I did." "Why so?" inquired Dantes. "Because it has instilled a new passion in your heart -- that of vengeance" (Dumas 56) This exchange illuminates the importance of the mentor's influence, for better or worse, in shaping the course of his student's future exploits, and for giving him a proposition upon which to rest hope and patience. Under the oppressive weight of the prison walls, it is clear to a man of Faria's experience that Dantes will undergo a change of disposition from which he will never recover but which, simultaneously, will drive him in his survival.

Though of questionable morality, Dantes' eventual desire to succeed in achieving revenge is instilled and made feasible by his mentor's guiding hand and by the hope which is introduces into him.

And it is only in Faria's death that his teachings begin to manifest as aspects of a real future, not for the impertinently youthful Dante's, now dead after year's of captivity, but for the inexorably patient and newly emergent Count of Monte Cristo. After an isolation from society, and in particular from those to whom he owed retribution, the Count returns to France with an iconoclastic knowledge of mathematics, science, philosophy and politics, all underscored by a stony and almost inhuman patiencee. In addition, he has the money with which to accomplish all of his aims in each of these disciplines. It is the steady precision and calculating patience which his mentor has given to him in order to re-establish order in a universe whose justice has been skewed since his framing. There is a constant irony to this impetus, as demonstrated above by Faria's proclaimed remorse over invoking the thirst for vengeance in his young apprentice and the Count's subsequent indulgence in all his fantasies of revenge on the wealth of knowledge and material which he inherited from the objecting old man. This is representative of the general duality in Faria's philosophical disposition, a sense which he imparts upon the Count before his passing, imbuing a dark mission with a sense of unwavering hope for justice.

We find this centering perspective in the Count when acting as a mentor himself, to the young and soon to be betrothed Maximilian. Here, he observes in the spirit of his long-deceased teacher, that "there is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness" (Dumas 479) This sentiment is one which, even years later, closely identifies the Count with the young and despairing Edmond Dantes under Faria's tutelage, capable only of finding hope in the patience which comes from knowledge.