What role does Fate play in the story?
The machinations of Fate figure prominently in the novel. For instance, when Defarge remarks that he believes it a strange fate that the son-in-law of his old friend Doctor Manette should be marked for death in Madame Defarge’s knitting. “Stranger things than that will happen when it [the revolution] does come” she replies. And stranger things do indeed occur. Doctor Manette himself is caught in Fate’s web when his prison manuscript becomes the means of destroying his family and later Madame Defarge suffers the workings of destiny when her unquenchable desire for revenge leads her to the Manette’s apartment and her accidental death by her own weapon. Charles Darnay’s mother provides one of the more telling predictions of Fate in the novel when she suggests that her son will have to pay for his father’s crimes. The exiled French aristocrats and the orthodox British bankers display a remarkable insensitivity to fate when they speak as though the revolution “were the one only harvest ever
