Jane Eyre Opening and Ending

Jane Eyre-Charlotte Bronte

A wretched miserable journey of a girl from breathing a life of being an isolated orphan, to an independent woman of her own judgment’s autobiography, Jane Eyre is described by a reader being allowed to trace her personal development as each of her experiences teaches her a lesson making her mature enough to sustain in the world. This essay will focus predominantly on the opening and closing of the novel.

The novel starts with “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been…….. Out of the question”, Brontë’s romantic description of the natural ambiance at the starting of every chapter never fails to create the reader’s mood to explore further into the book, this process has been initiated from the first chapter and spans across the whole novel. The tone of the novel is both vivid enriched with adjectives and also romantic, often alluding an atmosphere of mystery, privacy with a pinch of horror at some points. This is a retrospective bildungsroman rich with Brontë’s vivid language, which gives the reader an intensified understanding of every adjacent aspect of her life. From the very first sentence, we clearly get the impression of how pessimist Jane is, because of her behavior of seeing negativity in each and every aspect of life. The novel is beautifully written in first person narrator which gives us a personal feeling of what’s going on in the life of Jane but nevertheless bringing us also to confusing part because of the sympathy seeking nature of Jane, where we just get to know things from her perspective which makes her totally unreliable to her own statements. The sentence “I never liked long wlaks, especially on a chilly afternoon” which explains her whiny nature of complaining about everything, by this sentence we also get that it’s a cynic view of things that might not have any resemblance to others. We can also find foreshadowing with a touch of pathetic fallacy in the start of the novel as we can see in the very first chapter and paragraph Jane’s own emotion are linked to what she perceives as  “clouds so somber, and a rain so penetrating,” creating a situation where she seems powerless to evade.

The biggest downfall of the novel is the ending which depresses the readers because Bronte who works hard on building up a world of her own throughout the whole novel ends up making almost every character ending up living happily ever after at the end thus making us agree upon the fact that the novel has a fairy tale like ending. The concluding chapter of Jane Eyre starts with “Reader I married him” the point of attraction of the entire book lies in this one sentence because it explains the enthusiasm of Bronte to tell the readers that Jane finally got married. It also shows the fact that how important marriage was back then in the society and a woman can only find happiness in getting married. It’s the only part of book where she actually refers to the reader which is a disgrace, a destroying of a masterpiece to a magnificent novel, because a story should lie within itself and a narrator should never be a medium of communication between the readers, doing so makes it a cliché and same goes with Jane Eyre. The entire concluding chapter is after 10 years of marriage where Jane seems blissful with her marriage and she has a contact with most of the characters though the means of letter. The hindmost paragraph of the concluding chapter closes with “Amen; even so come, Lord Jesus!” this shows Bronte’s affection and adoration towards god in the book.

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