Le Père Goriot

I have read a novel by Honoré de Balzac, “Le Père Goriot”. It is for all the people who confront vanities of social interactions despite struggling thoroughly against them. It is a French story based on early 19th century. However, the theme underlay is definitely timeless. It shows a certain extreme of a human virtue might be sometimes rewarded, but mostly vanishes into the air in vain. All the devotions that a certain human made would be soaked up by ridiculous nature of gossips. Those gossiping people neglect the objective views and stick to the rumor they have created for their own fun. Le Père Goriot is a victim for these ridiculous matters and vanities. Socio-politically it exhibits fashionable societies in Paris during early 19th century, and literary-historically it is a core of “La Comédie humaine”, which Honoré de Balzac had created. The story acted as educations for two students (and a servant), who were struggling through the vanities, and would be interesting to all the people in similar circumstances even in the modern age. The experiences of confronting vanities all the more turn this story to a magnificent novel. The organization and sincerity of the narration is simple compared with the novel of modern age and there are not so many aspects silently shown. It is a novel of realism, leading to the followers of de Balzac such as Достое́вский and Толстой. It implies all the sorts of misunderstandings and contradictions observed in actual conversations of human beings.

              From viewpoints of structuralism contrasts among the scenes that invoke a happy solution of the story and the scene of the hopeless ending are the key architecture prominent in de Balzac’s novels. From viewpoints of postmodernism there are a lot of intertextual elements included in this story. Some of them are reappearances of characters in other stories of de Balzac. This methodology is an invention of de Balzac, which is seen in many series of stories in contemporary age. From narratology the soul of le père Goriot could be relieved by Christianity. In Buddhism, similar situation is described as an escape from saṃsāra.

              Overall, this story is all the people who are struggling in the world of gossips, as de Rastignac and Vautrin in this or other stories of de Balzac.