He gave the story , the point .. the meaning .. he represented life in a way or other..
the harshness that is always there in ppl ..
& Yes i find him mean , evil in sort of .. but yet we can't forget the end .. & how he regreted , or maybe gave up.. His personality was a strange one.. full of revenge for a man who had done nothing to him .. trying to do the law he knew.. whether wrong or right.
Somehow .. he suicided..
"He is asleep. Though his mettle was sorely tried,
He lived, and when he lost his angel, died.
It happened calmly, on its own,
The way the night comes when day is done."
Javert killed himself because of the guilt. Perhaps this means that he had never really experienced guilt before? His whole aim in life was to carry out the law and justice to the letter, he was trying to completely cleanse the world of all that he saw was evil by locking it away. He must have had some seriously mental issues, and really low self-esteem!
No, I don't think there was any guilt. Javert had served his life only in service of the police. He was convinced of the things he was taught (a criminal, always a criminal; low class people are likely to be criminals etc). There was no room in his life for anything else and there was no other purpose either. He had made his career in the wake of that and thanks to that.
At the point he has to acknowledge that Jean Valjean has become an honourable man who did not even shoot him when he had the chance, at the point he sees him save a man whom he himself has given up, he sees that must atone for that mere escape of twenty odd years ago. In al reasonability, he cannot put such a man in prison. He does no feel guilty, he cannot feel that as he has done nothing, but he would do if he did it. Still, his police-mind cannot bat an eyelid, he has to put Jean Valjean in prison, there is nothing for it. The man escaped, he has been found, he must be put in prison forever, that is the law. The man in Javert, though, cannot face that. Jean Valjean deserves mercy. He had the chance to murder him in the skirmish of the barricades, and no-one would suspect him. He would have got rid of Javert and the one who could find him and put him in prison again. However he did not. He deserves to get that freedom. The problem is that Jean Valjean is an exception and Javert, naturally, has not come across such an exception before. At the point he realises that he will be damned (by God too) if he puts him in prison, and damned if he does not, he knows there is nothing else left than to leave the policeforce. He cannot be an honorable policeman if he bats an eyelid. That straightforward rigidity and emotionlessness make a good policeman, distinguishes the good policeman from the corrupt one. Still, leaving the policeforce would be a solution, but... Javert has learned nothing, not a trade, he has no income, he has no family, he has nothing apart from the life of a policeman.
So, essentially, the only solution is no solution. That is why he writes his letter of resignation and then commits suicide. Being a policeman was literally his life.
One has to laugh before being happy, because otherwise one risks to die before having laughed.
"Je crains [...] que l'âme ne se vide à ces passe-temps vains, et que le fin du fin ne soit la fin des fins." (Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac, Acte III, Scène VII)
HahahaOriginally Posted by odysseus
Javert was not a villian, he was an enforcer of the law and Hugo used Javert to show how strictly it was enforced. Javert believed for all those years that he was doing the right thing enforcing the law and trying to capture Valjean but at the end he questions whether what he was doing was actually good. This left him conflicted with no comprehension of good and evil. Javert had believed that the law was good and lawbreakers evil but Valjean had taught him otherwise. Once he lost law as the way of enforcing good he was left with nothing which led to the tradegy of him taking his own life.
I definitely agree with the ones who say Javert was narrow- minded. Maybe it was a wrong perception of the society that never gave a chance to be good at that time. And Jean Valjean was a real character who needed empathy and support to go through.Unfortunately, when we think shallowly, consequences could be fatal. thanks...
I think we should never use such a simple and obscure term "bad" or "good" to describe any person in the world. Javet, in my opinion, follows the law he heartily believes. The difference between him and Valjean is he believe in the law made by human while Valjean believes in the law made by God.
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