Characters in Zola's Germinal

This study will compare and evaluate four characters in Emile Zola's novel Germinal, focusing specifically on the contrasting strategies and philosophies of Etienne, Rasseneur, Pluchart, and Souvarine in their efforts to win the support of the miners. The study will also speculate about which of these potential leaders' philosophy for action Zola most agrees with, and why.

Zola has deliberately created these four characters in order to demonstrate the various alternatives to action available to the workers in their struggle against the oppression of the mineowners, the capitalists. The four characters are meant to stand in stark contrast to one another, so that the reader can clearly see these alternatives in their various imperfect personifications.

Zola is too skilled a novelist to make the characters merely symbolic representations of those alternatives, and, accordingly, we find contradictions in each of them. Still, they emerge as clear spokesmen for four very different approaches to solving the problems of the miners.

Etienne is a radical. He has educated himself in socialist theory, and it is not long after he joins the miners as a fellow-worker that he begins to try to encourage the miners to take more severe steps to protest dangerous working conditions and low wages. He sincerely believes that his radical approach will force the mineowners to improve conditions and raise the pay of the miners. Etienne is an idealist who believes that radical steps can be take

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will be achieved. Similarly, he is contrasted with Pluchart in that Rasseneur does not believe that it is necessary to organize the workers under a socialist banner as a means to secure better working conditions. Pluchart is hardly a revolutionary, however. To the contrary, he is shown to be a theorist with his head in the clouds, little more than a bureaucrat who leeches off the funds of the organization he represents. It is not going too far to even compare him with the capitalists who own the mines and leech off the labor and profits generated by the workers. Pluchart himself lives the easy life, traveling about the countryside in leisure and comfort, recruiting members and trying to start up new branches of the organization. At the same time, when we consider that Etienne at the end of the book is headed to meet Pluchart, we cannot say that Zola has no worth at all for the Workers' International. This does not mean, however, that Zola has much use for Pluchart himself. In any case, it is clear that Pluchart is portrayed by Zola as somebody who is not passionately dedicated to the cause of the workers, who is not passionately dedicated to much of anything except continuing to enjoy the perks of his position in the org

Category: Literature - C