Create a new account

It's simple, and free.

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 taken to right the wrongs done the miners by the capitalist mineowners.

Before long, the hungry and confused miners are drawn by Etienne's increasingly fiery rhetoric: "Comrades, you have just heard, here is one of our old friends and that's what he has suffered, and what our children will suffer if we don't have it out once and for all with these thieves and murderers" (279). There is no doubt about Etienne's radical position with respect to the strike, and...

Page 1 of 6 Next >

More on Characters in Zola's Germinal...

Loading...
APA     MLA     Chicago
Characters in Zola's Germinal. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 05:07, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1681372.html