Flaubert's Parrot: Analysis of Major Characters
"Flaubert's Parrot: Analysis of Major Characters" delves into the lives and complexities of key figures surrounding the renowned 19th-century novelist Gustave Flaubert. Central to the narrative is Geoffrey Braithwaite, a retired doctor whose obsession with Flaubert manifests through his extensive research and travels to uncover truths about the author's life, particularly his enigmatic relationship with a stuffed parrot. Braithwaite's character is marked by his emotional detachment, stemming from the lingering pain of his late wife Ellen's infidelities and death, which he struggles to comprehend.
Flaubert himself is portrayed as a tormented genius, grappling with personal demons that include syphilis, misanthropy, and a complicated love affair with the writer Louise Colet. Colet, characterized by her maturity and artistic spirit, endures Flaubert's emotional neglect and humiliation, reflecting the struggles of women in both personal and professional realms during their time. The interplay between these characters illustrates themes of obsession, love, and the search for identity, while also highlighting Flaubert's influence on literature and the lives of those around him. This exploration invites readers to consider the intricate relationships and emotional depths that define both Flaubert's legacy and the lives he touched.
Flaubert's Parrot: Analysis of Major Characters
Author: Julian Barnes
First published: 1984, in Great Britain (first pb. 1985, in U.S.)
Genre: Novel
Locale: France and England
Plot: Experimental
Time: The early 1980's
Gustave Flaubert (gew-STAHV floh-BEHR), the famous nineteenth century novelist. He is the object of obsession of Geoffrey Braithwaite. He is a blond giant, a Norman who thinks of himself as being like a bear. By the age of thirty, however, his good looks have begun to crumble as the result of syphilis treatments that leave him increasingly balding and stout. He is also prone to recurrent epileptic fits. The son of a successful Rouen surgeon, Flaubert has failed in law school and begun a confirmed bachelor's life, devoted to writing while he lives on an inheritance from his father and tends to his niece and mother (with occasional interruptions for travel to exotic places). Flaubert's primary traits are his pessimism and his pronounced misanthropy. He dislikes humanity in general, with its stupidities and its intrusive technology, and the bourgeoisie in particular. He also fears any woman who might make permanent demands on him. The closest he can come to a normal love relationship is his off-and-on affair with Louise Colet, carried out on occasional railroad trips. Flaubert has little or nothing in his life beyond writing. After the failure of his first work, he achieves nothing remarkable in literature until the publication of Madame Bovary when he is thirty-six years old. Inept at handling money, he loses whatever he manages to make from his writing. At the cost of years of effort, he produces three more books that have some success; however, when he dies of a stroke at the age of fifty-five, he is impoverished as well as exhausted and obscure.
Louise Colet (lweez koh-LAY), Flaubert's long-suffering lover and literary friend. A writer herself, she is well known in the literary circles of Paris when she meets him at the age of thirty-five; he is eleven years younger. Although she is married, they have an affair for two years before ending it for a time. As much as Louise loves him, she finds his behavior, particularly his need to humiliate her, unbearable at times. By the time he is thirty years old, she thinks of him as old before his time. She endures many forms of neglect and abuse from him, but three years after they part, she takes up with him again. Louise is mature, self-confident, artistic, amorous, and patient. Flaubert tries to limit her social life, treats her like his student, and dismisses her writing. She endures four more years of fleeting hotel trysts before they part company for good.
Geoffrey Braithwaite, a retired medical doctor. His ruling obsession is collecting trivia about Flaubert's life and traveling in France to puzzle out enigmas such as the “true” identity of the stuffed parrot Flaubert used as his model in a story. Fond of talking, he delivers monologues to people encountered in such places as Flaubert's birthplace of Rouen or on a cross-channel ferry. Once, he even runs into a fellow literary detective, an American academic named Winterton who seems to have evidence of a previously unknown romantic entanglement in Flaubert's life. Geoffrey seems remarkably phlegmatic and undemonstrative, indifferent even to the memory of friends who died alongside him in the Normandy invasion. His literary passion for the long-dead Flaubert never quite masks his uneasiness about his late wife's pathetic adulteries. A serious man, always faithful to his wife, Geoffrey feels permanently damaged by her death. Although she may or may not have attempted suicide, it is certain that he turned off her life support system at the end. Geoffrey reluctantly finishes his monologue and turns to the “pure story” of his wife's betrayals, divulging as little personal information as possible. He believes that a relationship with a literary immortal ultimately is more interesting, as well as more rewarding. The truth eludes Geoffrey at the end, however; having tracked down a roomful of parrots, he can be no surer of the “true” parrot's identity than of the reasons for his wife's infidelity and death.
Ellen Braithwaite, the recently deceased wife of Geoffrey. In her husband's view, she was a clumsy, absentminded woman, as likely to snatch at illicit pleasures as to attend a winter sale in July. She is barely discreet in her “secret” life with other men, and Geoffrey's friends know all about her infidelity. Having borne Geoffrey's children and seen them through school, she falls into a “mood” that remains with her for the next five years, until her mysterious death at the age of fifty-five.