A study of character in the novels of Victor Hugo: Appearance, reappearance, disappearance

While Victor Hugo's lasting appeal as a novelist can in large part be attributed to the unforgettable characters he created, character has paradoxically been the most criticized and least understood element of his fiction. From contemporary critics to more recent ones, Hugo's novels have historically been evaluated (and devaluated) in light of the realist movement that won over his century. A critical revival relative to Hugo's work, and particularly his fiction, has done much to advance our understanding of the concerns that inform his writing, but the significance of character both within and to his fictional enterprise has yet to be brought fully into focus.;This study proposes a re-evaluation of the creation and role of character in Hugo's five major novels: Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), Les Miserables (1862), Les Travailleurs de la mer (1866), L'Homme qui rit (1869), and Quatrevingt-treize (1873). The first part of the study, appearance, explores the subversion of the romance and melodramatic traditions in Hugo's novels, which is effectuated both through the composition of Hugo's heroes, as each is instilled with a central irreconcilable opposition, and their itineraries, which alter or reverse prescribed roles.;The second part of the study, reappearance, proposes a grille de lecture that organizes and groups Hugo's characters so as to expose the reappearing template put in place in each of his novels. These repetitive patterns emphasize the fact that Hugo's fiction does not so much add up to a cohesive whole as continuously retell the same story, with each novel reconfiguring and building upon Hugo's ideological preoccupations.;The final part of the study, disappearance, examines the textual effacement undergone by Hugo's characters, and particularly his heroes, whose deaths are the culmination of a progressive process of depletion that begins with the dispossession of their fictional identities and ends with their erasure from the fictional world, down to the elimination of their names. This departure from character-centered fiction points to the ultimate disappearance in the Hugolian novel---that of the traditional nineteenth-century personnage romanesque---as character serves a new, non-psychological and conceptual function that challenges the notion of character as representation.