Critical Analysis Of Le Ventre De Paris

impartial from the object of study, which the omniscient narrator, a surrogate scientist, tries to achieve through the plot-structure, fluctuation of point of view, opposition of characters:

It is one of my principles, that one must not write oneself. The artist must be in his work like God in his creation, invisible and omnipotent. Let him be sensed everywhere, but not seen.

I even think that a novelist hasn’t the right to express his opinion on anything whatsoever. Has God ever expressed his opinion? Despite its commitment to impartiality, French realism becomes an attack, an intellectual condemn, upon the abuses and corruptions of society, the arena where the hero is tested. Zola wrote Le Ventre de Paris, which is a direct attack

Consequently, the text is a denounce of a social order in which human beings are forced to exploit or being exploited, the existential failure, the majority of them incur into, is a labyrinthine outcome where environmental determinism goes along with the weakness of the protagonists. Chinese postmodern realism, following the path traced by French realism, conquers the reader by describing the ugliness of life. However, it is not so much interested in condemning society, as it is in reviewing history over and over again. History is the backdrop covering the span of time from Liberation up to the Open Door Policy, yet ignored, unintelligible, un-decoded, characters shouting questions about human existence turn inward towards their subjectivity, their own past and one own body. As a reaction to the Avant-gardist experimentation, the shaking structure of the text and the destructiveness of the content, the second half of the 90s opens to a new realist school, or new-state of affair literature, a production somewhere between the stillness of traditional realism and the extreme subjectivity of

There is always an incident happening, changing and twisting irremediably, the fate of the hero for the better or worse. In Lost Illusions is Lucien’s encounter, just before taking his life, with a Spanish diplomatist who, we will discover in Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life, being no one but Venturin. In Father Goriot is Goriot’s sudden offer to Rastignac of house and money to share with Delphine, In Sentimental Education and Pierre and Jean is the somewhat mysterious legacy they are bestowed upon giving way to an alternative plot. In Stendhal, the inevitable moment, reveals itself being a curse for the protagonists: in The Red and Black is the letter Mme. de Renal wrote to pull the trigger of Julien’s rage and his forthcoming condemn, while in the Charterhouse of Parma is the involuntary crime-homicide Fabrizio committed, to seal his imprisonment and the discovery of his ill-fated love. The mediation of this external element, not only cracks open the atonality of the plot, but also frames itself within the texture of their personalities. Post Enlightenment figures, still romantic not yet modernist, emotionally extravagant, they assert their right to define their value, to love and succumb to the fatality of a passion. Flaubert’s Sentimental Education doesn’t have a strong plot and, if there is any suspense at all, it is directed on