"Look down, look down, sweet Jesus doesn't care."
In the musical, "Prologue" is simply a short devotion to the prison life that Jean Valjean spent nineteen years in. Obviously, there was more character development in those long nineteen years than a four minute song can convey.Summary
Jean Valjean had one sister, who had seven children. One particular winter, Jean Valjean was not able to harvest lumber to provide income for his sister, and therefore, no food was available: in the everlasting words of Victor Hugo, "There was no bread that winter. Literally no bread. Seven children!" Being a man of sacrifice, Jean Valjean had to resort to crime to feed his beloved sister and her children. He broke open a window to steal some bread from a bakery. Unfortunately (and that's really putting it lightly, let me tell you) for him, he was caught and sent to prison for five years charged with theft and breaking and entering.
In the galleys, Jean Valjean became an entirely different person. He went from someone who did what he could to serve his family well to someone who wanted to do everything he could to exact vengeance any way he could. After his arrest, Jean Valean only heard about his family once more for the rest of his life: his sister was alive and working, and had one child alive, who attended a school. After that, he never saw or heard from or about his family ever again.
He attempted to escape four times, and was caught each time. Each attempt added more and more years to his sentence. So, within the course of nineteen years, Jean Valjean not only developed a hate for the world, but also nurtured that hatred. Having nothing but time, Jean Valjean meditated on why it was acceptable for him to be thrown in jail for so long just for trying to feed his family. Was society to blame? Was society so corrupt and greedy that it tossed aside any defective parts? Or did it simply have no pity for the forgotten? Or maybe it was God Himself, for creating such a world? And if God did allow such a world to be created, perhaps then he also allowed everyone in it to be as cruel? For all these things and more, Jean Valjean slowly grew to hate the world that had never once showed him any kindness during his sentence in jail.
After nineteen long, hard, resentful, hateful years, our protagonist, Jean Valjean, was released from the prison in Toulon with one string attached: the cursed yellow passport. The yellow passport required Jean Valjean to return to the officials every so often to ensure he was behaving, and declared him as an extremely dangerous man (and rightly so; after being shown a lifetime of hate without any kindness whatsoever, that's all one learns how to feel and express).
The misfortunes and transgressions that Jean Valjean experienced in the first forty or so years of his life sets the stage for one of the most remarkable pieces of literature of all time, one which I will document here.
Analysis
As compared to the first forty or so pages that described what the ultimate good was like, the description of Jean Valjean's upbringing up until the present plot-line is one of what the ultimate bad is like. It showed that society, at least in the early nineteenth century, was cruel and unforgiving. Such an unfavorable society often produced unfavorable people, which then perpetuated the unfavorable society, which then produced more unfavorable people, etc etc. However, Jean Valjean is a man of enormous potential: he is strong, driven, and most importantly, caring; so he has the capabilities to step outside of the cycle and make something of himself. Unfortunately, in order to do so, Jean Valjean would have had to toe an impossibly minuscule rope to get there; and, as with most who have the potential of Jean Valjean, the rope snapped underneath him at the drop of a hat, and he barely managed to survive. During his stay at the prison in Toulon, Jean Valjean began to put his potential for greatness down the path of infamy instead. Of course, it couldn't be helped; it's almost as impossible to come out of a situation like his as a kind man as it was to become royalty. But one can only think about what would have happened if Jean Valjean hadn't broke into the bakery that night? Victor Hugo even remarks that, what if he had waited to ask for the bread instead of steal it? I think that Jean Valjean would've continued to work at the lumber mill, he would've continued to feed his sister's family, and would've continued to gravel about how hard he has it until he died, and no one would've been the wiser. That being said, I think that it wasn't only critical to the plot that Jean Valjean spend nineteen years in jail, but it was even more critical to his character.Spending such a long time in the galleys allowed him to see and learn the true nature of his society as well as himself. In the galleys he learned that he was a man of extremes, and of impulse: Jean Valjean became a man of hate, and at every chance he saw he tried to escape, despite numerous failures in the past. Furthermore, he became a man of intense passion: he saw how cruel the world he was in was, and realized that he was against it, that he was one of the many hundred thousands who were treated unjustly for no legitimate reason. It is this passion that would break him apart inside, and it is this passion that will make him the most influential characters in Les Misérables.
Thanks for reading,
Nick
No comments:
Post a Comment