Third-Person Narratives

Abstract

The a priori logic of Gide’s récits necessitates a certain outcome, in keeping with the aim of exploring an idea and pushing it to its limits. But when calamity strikes, the hero of each of these narratives asks if it had to happen. Even Jérôme, lacking in enterprise, envisages, albeit reluctantly, an alternative set of possibilities his story could have led to: ‘But to have kept her, to have forced the door, to have entered by any means whatever into the house ...’ (579; 117). The pastor is taken aback by the tragic turn of events which terminates his narrative, implying that it need not have culminated in so disastrous a climax: ‘What horrible thing can you have learnt? What did I hide from you that was so deadly?’ (927; 67). Like Michel, as Germaine Brée describes him, each of these narrator-protagonists ‘wears himself out trying to understand how a succession of apparently unimportant moments has assumed the inscrutable configuration of the ineluctable’.¹⁰⁴