The narrator says of him: “There is a way of falling into error while going in search of the truth. He had a sort of violent sincerity that made him see everything as a whole, without distinction” (III, III, VI, p. 649). Is this an accurate description of Monsieur Gillenormand’s grandson? Up to a point. Since Victor Hugo used many details of his own life in Marius’s biography, the novel treats the young man with more sympathy than he inspires in the reader. Marius is naive rather than intelligent, egotistical rather than generous, more passive than active, and, at crucial moments, like the ambush at the Gorbeau tenement when he is paralyzed by indecision, or in his egotistical dealings with Jean Valjean, he is simply not up to the task. In a world in which men are valued for their grand gestures, for the theatrical consequences of their actions, the two dramatic initiatives taken by the young man—to break with his uncle and to join the barricade at La Chanvrerie with his friends from the ABC—cannot just be seen as pure, unambiguous, acts. Does he leave the house on a point of principle or out of juvenile stubbornness, the whim of a spoiled child? If he had managed to get hold of the money to go to London and meet Cosette, he probably would not have gone to the barricade. On the barricade, he seems resigned rather than convinced of the cause, a victim of “visionary stupor that always precedes the fateful hour voluntarily accepted” (V, I, IV, p. 1210). It is obvious that he is there not out of political conviction, but because of fatalism and despair. Nor is his ideological conversion very convincing; it seems to be based on the quarrel with his old grandfather, a way of rebelling against family authority, rather than the result of an intellectual process or a moral conviction. For that reason, his political ideals do not prevent him, after a time, from returning to Monsieur Gillenormand’s house, making up with him, and, without any pangs of conscience, taking up the life that the old man had marked out for him since his birth. His Jacobin behavior was no more than an adolescent crisis.
And yet, this mediocre and nondescript figure, with all his hesitations and confusion, is the most “realist” character in the novel in that his actions are ambiguous and not obviously predictable, for it is in this ambiguity that we can recognize the unpredictability and relativity of real life. Marius seems of lesser stature because he is merely a man in a world of giants, because his actions are not grandiose, unlike the grandiose goodness of Jean Valjean, the bishop of Digne, or Gavroche, the grandiose evil of Thénardier, or the grandiose fanaticism of Javert. Instead his actions are ambivalent and lacking in that most essential characteristic of the romantic world: theatricality. Like all flesh-andblood beings, Marius is a contradictory person, both generous and egotistical, someone who cannot foresee whether his actions will have a positive or negative impact. When it comes to Cosette and the memory of his dead father, Marius is capable of energy, sacrifice, and heroism. But he behaves in a cold and even cruel way toward his grandfather and Jean Valjean. This ambiguity should make us sympathetic toward him, since he is so much like us, but instead, we find him irritating and unreal. Compared with the convincing heroes that surround him and demand our love and attention through their eloquence, Marius’s normality seems abnormal. His example shows us once again that fiction is not life but is in conflict with life: it is a life apart with its own laws and rules, in which, as in the case of Marius, excess seems normal to us and “realism” seems completely unreal.
