Although critics have seen Dickens as having emphasized the individual and domestic life at the expense of politics in A Tale of Two Cities, the novel offers reasons for thinking that Dickens was using it as an occasion for reevaluating our understanding of moral agency in modernity. In emphasizing resemblances that seem to blur the boundaries between individuals, Dickens calls attention to the ways in which we are not morally autonomous, in which our abilities to act are conditioned by our sometimes being taken for others. While that predicament might seem lamentable, Dickens concludes the novel by presenting Sydney Carton as a character who recognizes it well enough to see it as a riddle, and a riddle to be solved.