SOURCE: Leabhart, Sally. “No Free Rides: Descriptive Frame as Ideology in Maupassant's ‘L'Aveu.’” Symposium 50, no. 1 (spring 1996): 40-9.

In the following essay, Leabhart offers a structural examination of Maupassant's “L'Aveu.”

Guy de Maupassant's short story “L'Aveu” is, on several counts, about being taken for a ride. Whereas Céleste is the only passenger in the literal sense, those being transported unwittingly and idiomatically include, in different ways and according to different points of view, not only Céleste, her mother, and Polyte, but the implied reader as well. The text itself has in common with Céleste that both carry an unseen baggage that cannot be checked. In this tale of transport and baggage, the introductory descriptive frame has a problematic relationship with the narrative proper. The borders collapse when one observes that the frame, like the narrative, tells a story just as the narrative, in addition to telling...