Commentary on the Dickens Passage from Bleak House

Commentary on the Dickens passage from Bleak House

This passage is an imaginative description of the city (London) completely covered with fog. The third person-external narrator describes some realistic elements such as Lord Chancellor, the Lincoln's Inns Hall, the High Court of Chancery and also the ships, the apprentice boy on the deck, the pensioners "wheezing at the fireside", the husbandman and the ploughboy etc…But these realistic elements are described in an imaginative way , in particular, through the use of many similes e.g. "as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus….like an elephantine lizard…In this last simile we can also see the use of an oxymoron i.e. the association of two opposite elements, in this case the elephant and the lizard. Then the simile is made more vivid thanks to other elements used by the author such as the synaesthaesia (the smoke compared to a drizzle of rain) and the anthropomorphism of some inanimate elements (the full-grown snowflake, the mourning, the death of the sun) and ,further in the text, we can see a real personification of the fog: "the fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers…, the fog creeping in the cabooses,…fog lying out on the yards…"Another personified element in the text is the gas (as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look). This external narrator is imaginative and ironically detached at the same time and he/she carries out his/her diegetic function in an unusual way i.e. by using verbs at the present and gerund form; this gives vividness and immediacy to the story and we are being persuaded that these events are taking place now. Parallelisms and repetitions are also used to stress some elements of criticism towards the pollution of the city (fog everywhere, fog up the river, fog in the eyes and throat of pensioners…) and the condition of the English legal system (never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mire too deep to assort to the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery….). Because of this use of irony and sarcasm, the narrator appears to be omniscient. The whole passage can be seen as a metaphor for British society. We can also see this sarcasm at the end of the first paragraph (if this day ever broke).

The chapter opens with a one-word sentence which is followed, in the extract, by a series of very short noun sentences. These sentences are used maybe to introduce some deictic elements such as the time when the action takes place (November), the place (London), the atmosphere (fog everywhere). The juxtaposition of long and short sentences contributes to create a dynamic rhythm and a certain flexibility in this prose style.

In the first paragraph the narrator seems to describe what he/she can see in his/her close proximity: streets and animals covered with mud, people "jostling