Reading Reflections May 26- Story Length

Warning: contains spoilers

In high school, I loved Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo. An innocent young sailor is promoted to captain of his ship and is ready to wed the woman he loves. Two of his enemies frame him for a crime he didn't commit, sentencing him to life in prison. His unlikely escape and discovery of centuries-hidden treasures enables him to reemerge as the Count of Monte Cristo. Seeing that his enemies are now wealthy, the Count spends years hatching a plan and exacting his revenge.

Ten years after high school, I decided to read the full unabridged version, since we hadn't read the full version in class. The unabridged version is close to 1,200 pages! And I'm starting to see why my tenth grade English teacher had us read the reduced word count.

Don't get me wrong, the unabridged version is still plenty gripping (I'll sit down and read 50 pages at a time). But several chunks of the narrative are voluminous retellings of stories, which take up several pages and relay many unnecessary details. For example, one tale gives the upbringing of a famous Italian bandit, which only becomes relevant toward the end of his flashback (a key moment to establish the Count's relationship with the bandit). There's no need for a full chapter on these events, even if they brilliantly set up the rest of the story. The abridged version got one thing right: it gets straight to the point.

However, I'm still hooked on the novel even during these flashbacks. They essentially take me into a narrative inside a narrative, briefly straying away from the main storyline to give accounts of other details that will eventually prove relevant. The main positive is that it gives side characters their own stories and development, depicting them as their own people rather than simply inserting them as plot devices. The depth that Dumas grants his side characters makes the story feel more real, more human, though it is wholly fictional. And without it, The Count of Monte Cristo probably would not be, as one reviewer put it, "one of the best novels ever written."