Hotel Rouge Et Noir

Having collected and read The Red and the number of times black, from beginning to end, and tried and managed to find the thread - the nugget of gold - which makes it a great book, I finally abandoned. From now on I will just enjoy the novel. However, I will share some of my impressions.

Stendhal The Red and Black is considered a classic, but there is no high tragedy, a great tragedy, profound ideas, or the thrilling adventures of every kind. So why is it that every time I read it I find something new - something fresh - in it?

So what is the attraction of eternal The Red and the Black?

Compared to today's standards, the sex scenes in the book are absent; imagine the main character - Julien Sorel - spend hours, days and nights debating whether to reach, grasp and hold the hand of a woman or not. The action is also lacking. No cloak and dagger adventure. Yet the novel sizzles!

On the one hand, I can say it must be the psychological aspect of the book. In pre-Freudian novel, we see the unconscious forces - libido impulses, instincts, fixtures, players, the obsessions, passions and obsessions - at full speed in the characters. But in particular we get a pretty good idea of the intolerable, incomparable and uncompromising Julien Sorel. Then we have a fairly good understanding of the rich spoiled brat Mathilde de La Mole, and no less importance: the naive and sexually inexperienced Ms. De Renal. These three characters form a triangle fatal flaw.

But I must admit it is a novel of intrigue, a plot that does not get resolved until the end of the novel, with the disappearance of a horrible main character, whose Comeuppance I can not divulge here.

Given the time (the Napoleonic era), in which the story unfolds, scenes of seduction are more psychological than realistic. It is up and down, mood swings, agreements and disagreements, the strength and weaknesses of the trio that keeps the reader involved. Oh, another thing: pride. Pride is an essential ingredient and perhaps the most powerful force propelling the psyches of the characters.

And like Shakespeare's tragedies which the jokes we laugh at clowns "rather than crying for the pain of the players, with the antics of Julian we laugh, but we also mourn for him.

If you like the bizarre, you will also find here. One of my favorite passages in the novel where the hero, Julien Sorel, use a scale not only by fording a river and negotiate the terraces, but also to assemble and Mrs. De Renal boudoir. The ladder of success becomes a symbol not only of social climbing, but of self-enlightenment, at the end Julien comes to know itself. We find the image of the ladder in the Bible (Jacob), the Republic of Plato, Wittgenstein, like many other writers, you might say that Stendhal knew what he was doing when he chose this tool .

The Red and the Black is a novel that will never disappear, that never grow old, and we will read and reread over the years. Again, what is the secret? It is impossible to say - just enjoy! Eric Auerbach, a major criticism, tried to get to the bottom of it with his famous analysis entitled "In the Hotel de la Mole" from his famous book also: Mimesis, but in vain.

And that is fine with me, so that generations to come will be enjoying the reading, without anyone spoiling it for them.

However, I have a theory about the attractiveness of perennial novel: just as Don Quijote, Tarzan, Jay Gatsby, and very Golightly are prototypes, so Julien Sorel. When an author invents a prototype of fiction, the novel attains immortality. And woe to the authors whose characters fall a notch below prototypes - the oblivion that awaits them!