SOURCE: "Seduction Renounced: 'Sylvie' as Narrative Act," in Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction, University of Minnesota Press, 1984, pp. 97-122.

Here, Chambers analyzes several narrative approaches in Sylvie and comments on themes in the novella.

The Narration of Madness

Why [. . .] does the narrator produce the narrative act that is Sylvie? "Si j'écrivais un roman," he says (and [. . .] it is precisely not a romance he is writing), "jamais je ne pourrais faire accepter l'histoire d'un coeur épris de deux amours simultanés." This means that, in the antiromance he does give us, the purpose is not to resolve differences and contradictions by means of seductive discourse but to make sense of something that is, on the face of it, implausible, or more accurately, to have this implausibility "accepted"—by means of a narrative act that might be called, not seductive, but therapeutic. In this...