In The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas and The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck, the protagonists take journeys through time and show how life can change for the better or the worst. In The Count of Monte Cristo Edmond Dantes begins as a well-off sailor of the Pharaon. His well-being simply couldn't be better. He has a fair amount of money, a beautiful fiancée, and a caring, loving father awaiting him at home. As the story unfolds, Edmond is charged with the hideous crime of secretly holding ties with the Bonapartist group. He is thrown into prison where he undergoes solitary confinement and almost goes mad with loneliness. There he discovers another prisoner, the Abbé Faria, who introduces him to the idea that he was framed for treachery by his comrades, therefore installing the idea of vengeance inside Dantes's mind. "Dantes now begins to see clearly, and many details, which had been incomprehensible to him up to this moment, now begin to assume their real significance.
I almost regret having helped you in your researches and having told you what I did, he said Because I have instilled into your heart a feeling that previously held no place there--vengeance.- (p.85) Here the Abbé Faria, a prisoner that Dantes met in jail, has just revealed to him the possibility that he must have been framed for his crime by the people that he assumed were good friends.
Faria then teaches him all the knowledge he knows and before he dies leaves Edmond with the promise that he must go find a hidden treasure on the Isle of Monte Cristo. Several years later Edmond has changed his name to the Count of Monte Cristo and has become very wealthy off of his new found fortune. He now seeks out to take revenge on those that had him arrested. Monte Cristo reveals his twisted feelings, that he has accumulated since his prison experience, toward human suffering to the reader when he has just showed Franz and Albert his window over looking an execution.