An Analysis Of Le Leo Tolstoy's War And Peace

Great Essays
History can be viewed as an utterance of one very long sentence. There is a famous philosophical argument concerning our history and our future; the argument states that if determinism is true, and the past and the laws of the universe determine the future, then individuals do not hold sway over what is to come. In the simpler words of Leucippus, "Nothing occurs at random, but everything for a reason and by necessity".There are two kinds of actions; those that depend on free will and those that do not. Within history, there is a minimum of free will. Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace is a panorama of events governing Russian history and the Napoleonic era. An immense analysis of the vast world of public affairs and the private manifold of the characters reveals a series of particularized and intentional contrasts framing the course of history. …show more content…
Like the pulling of the strings of a puppet, time is a …show more content…
It allows things to emerge, but also to disappear, out of the present and into the past. Like the puppet, beings have limited free-will in this movement. We are governed by space and time, and cause and effect. Every past decision and action is essentially the antecedent of present decisions and actions; hence, history is merely a product of causality. In War and Peace, Tolstoy’s depiction of the war of 1812 proves that history is not created by a few great men, but by the actions of the masses. Tolstoy compares human history to a clockface, every individual representing its gears, wheels, and pulleys. “As in the mechanism of a clock, so also in the

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