SOURCE: Culler, Jonathan. “Values.” In Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty, pp. 212-28. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985.

In the following excerpt, first published in 1974, Culler asserts that bewilderment is experienced by both the characters in the unreal setting of Carthage and the readers of the novel itself. The critic theorizes that the characters' gradual attachment to the divine as a source of meaning and structure is portrayed so that the role of the sacred in human society is laid bare for the reader to dissect.

This is one of the basic problems confronting the reader of Flaubert: how is he to make sense of novels which thematize the difficulties of making sense and especially ridicule attempts to read life as if it were a novel, in accordance with those very operations which the reader is engaged in performing? In works like Madame Bovary and L'Education sentimentale our...