SOURCE: Stivale, Charles J. “Duty, Desire, and Dream: Maupassant's ‘La Petite Roque.’” Journal of Narrative Technique 20, no. 2 (spring 1990): 120-33.

In the following essay, Stivale explores the role and function of narrative desire in “La Petite Roque.”

A widower overcome by a maddening passion that results in the rape and murder of an innocent adolescent; the power and connivance of local officials who unwittingly succeed in thwarting apprehension of the criminal; the victim's phantasmic “return,” the murderer's remorseful will-to-confess, and a rural functionary's stubborn efficiency that forces the killer's ultimate demise—such are the essential elements that constitute the narrative matrix of Guy de Maupassant's short story, “La Petite Roque” (translated as “Little Louise Roque”). Produced midway through Maupassant's prodigious career (in November-December 1885), this tale stands as an exemplary synthesis of the problems of reading inherent to the concept of narrative desire in Maupassant's fiction. In this essay, I...