Journal Article

\Abstain, and Hide Your Life\: The Hidden Narrator of \Flaubert's...\

Cox, Emma

2004

Overview

\"Julian Barnes’s [1984 novel] Flaubert's Parrot is told from the first-person viewpoint of Geoffrey Braithwaite, a retired doctor. Ostensibly, the novel is Braithwaite's account of his meticulous research on Gustave Flaubert. Like any first-person narrator's, his account of other characters in the novel is colored by personal bias; indeed, it reveals as much about Braithwaite as about the characters concerned. As we read the novel, it becomes apparent that Braithwaite's interest in Flaubert is intimately related to traumas in his own personal life--in particular, to the adultery and suicide of his wife Ellen. In telling us about various characters, Braithwaite alternates between using the Flaubertian world as a means of avoiding these traumas and of seeking to understand them. In addition, because Braithwaite lacks a sense of his own self-worth, he tries, in his account of Flaubert, to identify himself with the great author in terms of both his life experience and his character; Braithwaite is particularly attracted to the fact that Flaubert was solitary and withdrawn from life.\" (Critique) This essay examines the \"hidden narrative\" in Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot, illuminating ways in which the novel's \"complicated and profoundly troubled\" narrator adopts a \"Flaubertian ethos, which states that one should 'Abstain, and Hide' from life.\"

• Subject: Adultery / Authors, English / Barnes, Julian / Characters and characteristics in literature / Criticism / Death in literature / Fiction, Stories, plots, etc / Fiction, Themes, motives / Flaubert, Gustave (1821-1880) / Isolation (Philosophy) / Literature, Themes, motives / Madame Bovary (Book) / Recluses / Recluses as authors / Suicide in literature