Hmmm. Marius. I really do think he's supposed to be messed up by his awful upbringing, and he has problems connecting with people because nobody ever really treated him as a person until he met Les Amis. And there are times I feel very sorry for him. I think the difficulty for me is that while his being stuck in this rut is believable I don't find it very satisfying to read about.
His story is structured like a coming of age tale, but he doesn't seem to learn much. After four years of being friends with a revolutionary, after seeing abject poverty first hand, after going through the barricade, he still reacts to Valjean's story like a conservative bourgeois. If it happened early in his story, if we saw how much he had to learn, then saw him learning, I'm sure I'd feel differently, but it's the end of his on page story. Maybe he does learn a vital lesson, but we don't get to see it, and that feels like strange storytelling.
And as others have said it's hard to be sure how much of his behaviour we're supposed to find wrong. I don't think we're meant to be on board with how he treats Valjean, but some of the stuff with Cosette I just don't know if it's meant to be messed up, or if Hugo thinks it's fine and that makes for uncomfortable reading. Either way I find I'm not very confident about their future at the end.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2014-05-01 10:27 pm (UTC)His story is structured like a coming of age tale, but he doesn't seem to learn much. After four years of being friends with a revolutionary, after seeing abject poverty first hand, after going through the barricade, he still reacts to Valjean's story like a conservative bourgeois. If it happened early in his story, if we saw how much he had to learn, then saw him learning, I'm sure I'd feel differently, but it's the end of his on page story. Maybe he does learn a vital lesson, but we don't get to see it, and that feels like strange storytelling.
And as others have said it's hard to be sure how much of his behaviour we're supposed to find wrong. I don't think we're meant to be on board with how he treats Valjean, but some of the stuff with Cosette I just don't know if it's meant to be messed up, or if Hugo thinks it's fine and that makes for uncomfortable reading. Either way I find I'm not very confident about their future at the end.