Commentary on Braithewaite's Flaubert

In Flaubert’s Parrot, the narrator Geoffrey Braithwaite’s search for Flaubert’s parrot in an attempt to write Flaubert’s biography is a personal digression and displacement of the narrator’s search for an inner truth, in coming to terms with his wife’s extramarital affair and her subsequent suicidal attempt. It is written in the form of a journal, a collection of notes and prose intended as research for Braithwaite’s biography on Flaubert. Notably, there is an obsessive compulsion to voice the futility of arriving at a complete truth, that the part unknown plays a far larger role than does the part known. Indeed, Braithwaite explores multiple perspectives and versions on events not only so he can present the fairest account of Flaubert’s life and opinions but to show that one can never arrive at a static, objective truth. The multiple perceptions can be categorized into two: the hard facts and accompanying interpretation. The intertwined nature of these two categories disrupts and distorts the ideal of writing the impartial biography.

Geoffrey Braithwaite is aware that there are multiple interpretations on facts that disturbs the readers’ assurance that they can safely arrive at some fixed knowledge from Flaubert’s biography. Braithwaite offers three versions of chronologies, prodding the possibilities in which the reader would approach to understand Flaubert’s life. The first is an account of social and personal life, the second of deaths, metaphysical and metaphorical, of emotional significance to Flaubert, and the third of translated quotations from Flaubert. The three versions are all hard, and hence impartial facts. However the lack of closure of these three chronologies provoke the reader to question whether these are the only necessary facts in order to understand Flaubert. Braithwaite leaves the facts for open interpretation. The narrator then proceeds to question the legitimacy of secondary sources as he recounts an encounter with Ed Winterton in which...