SOURCE: "The Narrators of Mérimée's Carmen" in Nottingham French Studies, Vol. 27, No. 2, November, 1988, pp. 1-12.

In the following essay, Cogman describes the function of the elder and younger narrative voices in Mérimée's Carmen, noting their relation to the work's themes of freedom and constraint.

When it was first published in the Revue des Deux Mondes of 1st October 1845, Mérimée's Carmen¹ did not contain the concluding chapter on gypsy customs and language, which was only added in the 1847 publication in volume and in all subsequent editions. This chapter has always posed problems for commentators. Some have just treated it as an excrescence: for Trahard it is a 'dissertation pédante' that weakens the thrust of the story; for A. W. Raitt, it is a 'wilfully perverse' addition; for M. J. Tilby, 'little more than a learned appendix'.² For these critics, the central interest...