What makes “The Melancholy Hussar” such as a sad and unhappy tale?

Authors Avatar

What makes “The Melancholy Hussar” such as a sad and unhappy tale?

To what extent do the attitudes people had at this time affect the atmosphere of despair?

The short story of the “Melancholy Hussar” is such a sad and unhappy tale because the events that go on within the story are all very sad.  The reader’s hopes go up and down all the way through the tale.  As you read the story the author Thomas Hardy makes the reader feel very sad and unhappy, by the way he brings realism to the story.  The time at which the story is set also makes it sad because the rules of society make it much harder for the young girl Phyllis who is the main character, to have a relationship with a man that she really loved rather than someone whom her father considered to be the right person for her.  Also the constant rising and dashing of hope for the future bring over the feeling of despair. This story has a lot of bitter irony about some of the events that make it sad and unhappy, an example of this is when Hardy uses coincidence, bad luck, fate, and chance to the story.  Phyllis is always on a roller coaster going backwards and forwards, going from happy to sad.  One way in which Hardy makes the reader think that the story is real is by describing the scenery at which the story is set and the time it was set in.

          Thomas Hardy starts the story by saying “Phyllis told me with her own lips”, this makes the story have realism.  Hardy also says that this is a story he could never forget.  Hardy presents the story to us as if he is telling the story directly to the reader.  At the beginning of the story, Hardy makes the story seem real, he does this by saying, “here is the place”, when he says this it makes you feel as if you are really there and he is showing that particular place to you.  Another example of hardy reading directly to the reader is at the end of the story when the two soldiers Matthaus Tina and Christoph are executed, Hardy writes the inscription of what is written on their gravestone.  This makes you feel very sad and that you are really there experiencing what is going on.  We are told that the soldiers’ uniform was strange “epaulettes, queer cocked hats, breeches, gaiters, and ponderous cartridge box and buckled shoes”.  Another example of realism is when Hardy talks about the dates and ages, this gives it realism for example “she was then an old lady of seventy five and her auditor a lad of fifteen”.

Join now!

          At the start of the story Phyllis presents herself to be very unhappy.  Phyllis is very lonely; she lives alone with her father whose hobby is trimming the box-tree borders to the plot.  She is so lonely that every noise she hears her imagination thinks it is a visitor, for example “like the brushing skirt of a visitor” was heard on the doorstep it proved t it proved to be a scudding leaf.  She is also thinking that she is seeing things, like when she imagined that she could see someone at the end of ...

This is a preview of the whole essay