In Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, the first section is devoted to the unfortunate downfall of the promising young sailor Edmond Dantes, who, due to circumstances that involve the emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, a forged letter, and an ambitious procurer du roi, lands in a maximum-security prison to rot away. Dumas, like any good high romance author, suspends the action to promote the drama of the situation; he does this by immediately switching the story to a completely new cast characters whose stories are a decade or so after Dantes’ incarceration. At the outset of chapter 25, Dumas breaks down the fourth wall and tells a seemingly new story about an inn in the south of France. Slowly, a figure emerges who styles himself as the Count of Monte Cristo. Dumas doesn’t tell the reader outright, but provides subtle clues throughout the next 50 or so chapters, that he is in fact Dantes, and the old cast of characters have new names and costumes that time makes them don. This switch of perspective to seemingly new but familiar characters, and slow unveiling of the truth mimics the way that Dantes, in the guise of the Count, will slowly take his anonymous revenge throughout the next thousand or so pages.
Adam Roberts’s review of the book has a section that focuses on how the Count goes through “great lengths not to avenge himself directly” (para 5). He does not directly kill his adversaries, and he does his beneficent acts incognito. Dumas mimics this oblique way the count carries out his mission with the way Dumas reveals the character of the count himself. Roberts rightly points out that Dumas presents the count as “a master of disguise and manipulation” who could do whatever he pleased, but that “delay is the narrative watchword” (para 5). In the same way, Dumas suspends the action in order to draw out Dantes’ revenge. Both Dumas’ structuring of the book with a suspension of the action and his slow, methodical revelation of the real character of the Count augment the intense suspense of Dantes’ meticulous doling out of punishment and the way the Count slowly reveals himself. What Robert’s calls the “sheer, brute, glorious interminability” of the novel is attributed to this brilliant layering of form over content on the part of Dumas (para 1).
Roberts, Adams. “The Count of Monte Cristo.” http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/the_count_of_monte_cristo/. Web. 28 August, 2014
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