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SOURCE: "Narrative as Moral Action in Mérimée's Colomba," in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Vol. 14, Nos. 3-4, Spring-Summer, 1986, pp. 225-37.
In the following essay, Crecelius explores the moral dimension of narrative form and the multiplicity of viewpoints in Colomba.
Colomba has long been one of Mérimée's best-known and most admired stories. It is a complex tale of crime and punishment in which elements of what we have come to know as the detective story are inscribed within a larger narrative that investigates the nature of guilt, justice and truth, and their relationship to literature. Indeed, Colomba can be viewed most profitably as a work whose very subject is the process of interpretation: it represents the successful attempt to forge a unified conception of two events, a murder and its revenge, in light of and despite the multiple interpretations to which each of those events is subject...
This section contains 5,905 words (approx. 20 pages at 300 words per page) |
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