Abstract

Marie’s cycle is the story of an endless separation. The homodiegetic narrator gazes at Marie, the woman he loves, when she is next to him. However, she often hides from him. And what cannot be seen cannot be known either. To compensate for this double lack, the male protagonist replaces view by vision. With his invisible eye, he can observe his beloved from a distance. Thanks to his privileges as an omniscient and omnipotent narrator-observer, he reconstructs the diegesis and stages the characters to his liking – Marie and her lover, Jean-Christophe de G., or Marie alone. As he looks down on the story, he can move from painful distance to facetious detachment.