The Last Day Of A Condemned Man Essay

Typically in writing, there are three different points of views an author can write in. The novel The Last Day of a Condemned Man by Victor Hugo and The Execution of Tropmann by Ivan Turgenev are both written in the first person. Both authors chose to write in the first person and about the same topic which was the death penalty. The only difference being who the main character is telling the story. In Hugo 's book, the story is told through the eyes of a condemned man and Turgenev writes from the perspective of a witness. By doing it this way readers get similar stories told from both sides of the spectrum of the death penalty. Using the first person while talking about the same thing in different ways can still be equally as effective and informative. By writing in the first person it allowed readers to be rooted in the characters head which provided a tighter emotional connection. This wouldn 't have been as deeply received if the text was written in second or third person. The emotions that the characters in Hugo and Turgenev writing gave off was strong enough to make the audience feel bad for them. It led

He wrote this story to inform people of the death penalty but while telling his story it ended up becoming emotional. We as readers are manipulated into identifying with the condemned man and everything he is going through. Hugo makes us feel bad and pity the condemned man even though he is a criminal. Readers are able to experience the physical and metal pain the man is going through. “Its as if the blade of the guillotine took six weeks to fall.”(Hugo 58) Being sentenced to death isn 't a simple process but instead on that drags out for an extended amount of time. Its enough to make a man go mad and become lost inside his own mind. We see this through the time the condemned spent in his cell waiting to be sent to the