SOURCE: "Narrative as Moral Action in Mérimée's Colomba," in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Vol. 14, Nos. 3-4, Spring-Summer, 1986, pp. 225-37.

In the following essay, Crecelius explores the moral dimension of narrative form and the multiplicity of viewpoints in Colomba.

Colomba has long been one of Mérimée's best-known and most admired stories. It is a complex tale of crime and punishment in which elements of what we have come to know as the detective story are inscribed within a larger narrative that investigates the nature of guilt, justice and truth, and their relationship to literature. Indeed, Colomba can be viewed most profitably as a work whose very subject is the process of interpretation: it represents the successful attempt to forge a unified conception of two events, a murder and its revenge, in light of and despite the multiple interpretations to which each of those events is subject...