I Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert uses four different narrators in ‘Madame Bovary’. Each is utilized differently than the others, to express the plot and the thoughts of the characters uniquely and experimentally.

The first sentence of the novel introduces the 1st person plural narrator, which uses ‘we’ when speaking: “We were in study-hall when the headmaster entered, followed by a new boy not yet in school uniform and by the handyman carrying a large desk.” The narrator is one of the school children, as is made clear when he says, “We began to recite our lessons.” The 1st person plural narrator disappears by the second page and is not heard from again. The use of ‘we’ is unique in that it places the narrator not only in the world of the novel, but also with the reader, by dispensing with the detachment that a reader would normally feel by having events related by a 3rd person, objective narrator.

However, a 3rd person omniscient narrator is present in ‘Madame Bovary’, after the 1st person plural suddenly disappears. The narrator is not an active participant in the story, unlike the ‘we’ narrator. The 3rd person omniscient speaker is invisible and serves to relate events, both past and present. An example of this narrator is seen soon after the 1st person plural departs, as it relates a short history of the Bovary family: “His father, Monsieur Charles-Denis-Bartholome Bovary, had been an army surgeon’s aide, forced to leave the service about 1812 as a result of involvement in a conscription scandal.” Another characteristic of this narrator is that it speaks with authority (which comes with being omniscient), and acts as a philosopher, pondering and judging the characters and their actions (which sometimes clashes with the idea of an objective narrator).

The third use of narration seen in ‘Madame Bovary’ is the dialogue, which simply is one character speaking to another. This is a common device that needs no excessive explanation. Dialogue reflects the characters’ limited knowledge of events and others, very different from an omniscient narrator. Examples can be found throughout the novel, wherever a character is speaking.

The fourth form of narration is Flaubert’s use of words in italics, such as: “She found him one: a hussier’s widow in Dieppe”; “the officer de sante”; “favorite show pieces of cauchois farmyards”; and, “He addressed her as “ma femme,” using the intimate tu”. The use of italics indicates a shift in point-of-view and perspective of the community. The italicized words are mostly French (Flaubert’s language) words or phrases, which serve to characterize the provincial setting of the novel.

Flaubert uses these different forms of narration to both enrich the work by experimenting with narration devices, and also to expand the available possibilities by criticizing the exclusive use of only one form.

Gustave Flaubert / Leo Tolstoy / Fyodor Dostoevsky