The Narrator

The narrator starts out the novel as a young boy enraptured with his grandmother's stories about her homeland, France. The narrator remains unnamed throughout the entire novel with only one exception near the end of the novel when his grandmother refers to him as "Aloysha." The entire novel centers around the narrator's perpetual struggle to figure out where he belongs in the world. Although he is drawn to his grandmother's stories about France, the narrator questions how a love of France might change his Russian heritage. While living in communist Russia after the second World War, the narrator is profoundly enamored with the luxurious stories of a democratic, wealthy France, and feels that the Russian people with which he is surrounded are simply unenlightened as to how beautiful their lives could be, so he sets out to discover a language that will convey French beauty to the...