Monte Cristo Hope and Patience Essay

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.

It is thus in the Count of Monte Cristo, where Faria plays a constant part in the proceedings, even years after his death. As a philosophical exploration of morality and personal justice, Dumas uses Faria's learned hope and patience as a means to endowing his protagonist with the capacity to explore in their entirety the novel's most challenging questions. Thus, there is something crucially compensatory in his admonishment to wait and hope. Even as he recognizes the folly of his quest for revenge, the Count finds himself capable of another kind of success, also due to Faria's guidance. Just as he can endow misery, so can he show the route to happiness, a sign not just of his capacity for success due to a wise mentor, but also of his assumption, in aged wisdom, to rise to the challenge of mentorship himself.

Works Cited

Dumas, a, "The Count of Monte Cristo," Scholastic….....