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Comparison of Passages from Great Expectations and Madame Bovary

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The two passages, taken from early sections of Great Expectations and Madame Bovary, deal predominantly with the subject of death and the spectrum of approaches applied by their characters to deal with such circumstances. Both Charles Dickens and Gustave Flaubert draw particular attention to the binary codes of public and private life and the extent to which the characters are compelled to manipulate or conceal their true feelings in order to conform to their societies' dogmatic customs and expectations of decorum. In these passages Dickens and Flaubert also highlight the strength of feeling towards their lost love one of their characters, Joe and Charles, basking in what Lafayette calls "the innocence of early youth." However, …show more content…

On the other hand, as an author, Flaubert believed it was better for him to retain a degree of impersonality in the text, and therefore Flaubert does not employ a narrator to direct readers' thoughts. As Erich Auerbach has commented in Mimesis: the Representation of Reality in Western Literature about Flaubert's work,

His opinion of his characters and events remains unspoken; and when the characters express themselves it is never in such a manner that the writer identifies himself with heir opinion, or seeks to make the reader identify himself with it. We hear the writer speak; but he expresses no opinion and makes no comment.

Auerbach continues by describing Flaubert's role as a novelist as merely to describe events with such lucidity and clarity that no additional judgement or explanation is required, such as would be given by a third-person narrator. Furthermore, Flaubert writes in a letter to Louise Colet that desires a novel with `no lyricism, no comments' (cited in George Becker's Documents of Modern Literary Realism). Thus this passage shows Flaubert straightforwardly describing the events of Emma's funeral with simplicity and unfussiness. Such starkness draws out in readers an empathy which is beyond language, as Flaubert endeavours to bypass what he saw as corrupting words and images communicate to his readers soul to soul. For example, when Flaubert writes, `the coffin

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