Manzoni Chapter 34 Summary

Of the two assigned chapters in the Betrothed, I found chapter 34 to be the most interesting. Alessandro Manzoni, the author of the historical novel, begins chapter 34 with the character Renzo trying to find his way into the heavily guarded, plague-filled city of Milan in order to find the love of his life, his fiancée Lucia. Renzo finally finds his way into the city by paying the guard a half-ducat. However, one obstacle that Renzo often encountered in his journey to find Lucia was that he did not know the exact address of where Lucia was staying at and almost nobody in the city seemed to be willing to help him find the location( that is, until a priest finally agreed to show him the way). This, perhaps, can be attributed
This is perfectly illustrated when Renzo attempts to ask a man for directions, to which the man responds in fear, threatening Renzo, pointing a stick directly at Renzo's body as if to defend himself from the "villian," who "had been all ready to play him a dirty trick," as the man described Renzo when explaining the incident to his family. The man further goes on to say that if Renzo came any closer to him , he'd "have run him through" before Renzo could do anything to him (Manzoni, p. 3). People in the city, such as this man, had such an irrational fear of the plague (and understandably so, considering the amount of people the plague has killed within the city), that they let it completely take over their lives. Moreover, this situation perfectly depicts the overall negative psychological effects that the plague had on many people, who wrongly started to think that everybody was out to get them or hurt them, as the man erroneously did with Renzo, a man who meant no harm and was just seeking for directions to find his
As Renzo makes his way through the city of Milan, Renzo often encountered a countless number of dead bodies laying on the ground, only waiting to be picked up by the monatti. Additionally, Manzoni writes this chapter in a style which seems to be very sympathetic towards those infected by the plague. "Piled up and interwoven together, the dead looked like a cluster of snakes slowly reviving in the warmth of spring," Manzoni describes of the horrifying sight of all the dead bodies being mounted up and stacked against each other(p.5). I thought Manzoni did a great job here, as well as the rest of the chapter, of making the readers truly sympathize with what the people of Milan had to suffer through in the plague. Furthermore, Manzoni's description of this tragic scene reminded me a little bit of the Holocaust in that similar to the holocaust, so many people were killed by the plague that all the dead bodies started being piled up against one another, almost like lego pieces, a frightening thought. The more I started to think about, the more parallels I started to see between the two. Thousands, if not millions, of families were affected by the plague, tearing parents away from their children and vice versa as the Nazis regularly did when lining people up for concentration camps. For instance, in chapter 34 of the Bethrothed, Manzoni describes a somber scene in which the character Renzo