The Les Miserables duet reminds me, I dont think I ever put up here some analysis I wrote a bit ago about Javert in Les Miserables. Hes a really interesting character: In Les Miserables, Javert’s suicide song is beautiful. It fully captures the divide between law and justice. Under Javert’s previous mindset, law is justice, and any deviation of the law must be injustice. As he says, “I am the Law and the Law is not mocked.” However, by saving Javert’s life without any pretense of reciprocity and by only trying to delay his own arrest to save another life, Jean Valjean shows Javert that laws can be unjust and that strictly adhering to duty promotes this injustice. Rather than merely following the laws of the state, Javert realizes that one’s individual moral conscience guides a sense of justice. Thus, Javert says, “And does he know, that granting me my life today, this man has killed me even so? . . . I’ll escape now from the world, From the world of Jean Valjean.” The world of Jean Valjean is a world of individuals determining justice, deciding right and wrong for themselves. For a man like Javert who had eliminated personal decision-making as a guide to justice, the world of Jean Valjean is completely incompatible with his own. If Jean Valjean is right that justice exists outside the laws of the state, then Javert has devoted his life to imposing laws rather than promoting justice. The breakdown of law from justice, of Javert and Jean Valjean, leaves Javert with the realization that his life work of strictly enforcing laws has contradicted his life goal of promoting justice. When someone commits injustice, under Javert’s worldview, they deserve punishment. However, no prison will arrest Javert for legally enforcing injustice. Therefore, the only remaining possibility is to make a personal evaluation of justice, to determine oneself to have sinned, and to inflict the punishment on himself. Javert kills himself for all the injustices he has done in the past. In doing so, he for the first time uses his own moral conscience instead of the laws of the state as the guide to justice - his first and last true act of individuality.
Posted on: Mon, 31 Mar 2014 17:56:04 +0000
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