calls it recalled to life But Dr Manette s mental scars remain This tragedy shows how injustice can destroy a man s identity The love of his daughter Lucie helps him heal However the shadow of his long suffering never fully leaves His pain reminds us of the cruelty of the old society before the Revolution Cruelty and Suffering Another tragic element is the suffering misery of the common people The peasants have hardly anything to eat At the same time the cruelty of the nobles makes the tragedy worse The Marquis St Evr monde runs over a poor child with his carriage and throws a coin as payment He says It is extraordinary to me that you people cannot take care of yourselves and your children This cruelty shows why the Revolution came Later we realize the tragic truth that violence breeds violence Charles Darnay and the Curse of His Family Charles Darnay is another tragic character Although he is kind and rejects his family s cruelty he cannot escape revenge As the nephew of the Marquis he is hated by the French people When he returns to France to help a servant he is arrested as an enemy His fate shows a tragic truth sometimes people suffer not for their own sins but for the sins of their families Darnay s suffering is a tragic element in this novel The Revolution and the Terror The French Revolution itself is a tragedy in the novel The people s anger is just but their revenge becomes cruel The guillotine becomes a symbol of endless death Madame Defarge who has lost her family to aristocratic cruelty turns into a cold-blooded murderer Her knitting records the names of those marked for death The narrator describes her knitting in the following manner Madame Defarge knitted with nimble fingers and steady eyebrows and saw nothing Dickens shows how the desire for justice can change into blind violence Sydney Carton s Sacrifice Sydney Carton is a tragic figure in this novel His unrequited love for Lucie and later his self-sacrifice for Lucie s happiness is very heart-touching Nonetheless this tragedy makes him a great character At first Carton is a lawyer with great talent but no purpose He drinks heavily and calls himself a jackal He loves Lucie Mantte but she is married to Charles Darnay At the end he takes Darnay s place at the guillotine For Lucie s happiness he sacrifices his own life His last words are It is a far far better thing that I do than I have ever done His death is tragic because he died young But it is also uplifting because it gives meaning to his wasted life In conclusion Dickens combines personal pain with historical violence to create a true tragedy in A Tale of Two Cities Dr Manette s suffering the misery of the poor and the cruelty of the aristocrats are all tragic elements The novel also tragically shows that blind revenge leads to more violence Through the character of Sydney Carton Dickens shows that even in a cruel world love and selflessness can give hope