ON THE NARRATOR IN MADAME BOVARY

Abstract

The paper written in polemics with the truisms of the Soviet literary criticism (identification of Flaubert with his narrator in Madame Bovary , Flaubert’s critical realism etc.) analyses in full detail a figure of the narrator in this novel, his methods of self-presentation, motives of narration, narrative metamorphoses. A particular attention is given to analysis of the narrator’s “we”, “nous”, “madness” and to the related images of “lie”, “mask”, negative search for Absolute, the embodiment and symbol of which in the novel is death, non-being. In context of lie, the characters of the novel, in-cluding Homais, are not opposed to each other but are the continuation of the narrator’s projections as well as of Flaubert’s personal views on writing. The paper actualises intertextuality of the novel corresponded with images of Saint Anthony, Don Quixote, King Lear, Hamlet and also of quest, fulfilled in a tradition of some apothetical mysticism or gnosticism.