Fictional characters who mistake reality for fiction can be considered as parodies, beings invented by the author to denounce the illusions of which they are victims. But this viewpoint is not valid if the novels in which those "mistaken readers" exist suggest, to the contrary, that reality is problematic; it is therefore impossible to judge the characters without "afterthoughts", since these characters, in a way, are pointing to the fact that the reality they live in is "unreal". / Such is the case with Madame Bovary and Don Quijote. These two novels, as a result of different "techniques", essentially tell their readers to be suspicious about what is "true" and what is "false". These are novels without a strong authorial voice, novels that speak more about how characters conceive reality than about reality itself, which remains in both cases a complete mystery. / This viewpoint can be extended into a definition of the novel, in terms of what it says (or doesn't say) about the world. And in fact, a novel doesn't say anything about the world, at least not directly. It could be described as "a machine" made from what the characters say. Obviously, such a machine cannot be taken too seriously, since nobody (that is to say no real person) is actually saying what is being said in its pages. But at the same time, by refusing to show the fictional world in itself, (by always showing it through the eyes of fictional characters), the novelist reminds his reader that the real world itself is inescapably ambiguous.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.27967 |
| Date | January 1997 |
| Creators | Roy, Yannick. |
| Contributors | Ricard, Francois (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | French |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Arts (Département de langue et littérature françaises.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001615467, proquestno: MQ37233, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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