Hi! I was reading Monster and I wanted to ask you, since you're really good at character and story analysis, what do you think changed for Franz Bonaparte in order for him to become the non-threatening innkeeper at Ruhenheim who looks after Wim and is ready to die to atone for his actions? When he rescued Anna I didn't get the sense that he necessarily regreted his actions, at least not to the degree he shows as an older man. Is it just a factor of age and given time to reflect?
Thank you for your nice words and sorry for the wait!
As usual, it has been a while since I read the whole series and even if I reread some parts to answer asks, I might very well miss something.
When it comes to Franz Bonaparta’s transformation, I think that what happens is explained in his last book:
A Peaceful Home is the story of a thief who wants to steal from some villagers, but, by living together with them, he forgets how to steal and starts helping them instead.
It is clear that this story is a metaphorical representation of what happened to Bonaparta. When he arrived to Ruhenheim he progressively left his old ways behind and became a different person.
The question is ”why did this happen”?
All in all, we can’t be sure because we are not shown Bonaparta’s transformation, but rather its result. That said, we can make some considerations thanks to what the story offers.
First of all, I would say that Bonaparta is very similar to Johan:
As a matter of fact, as I have written in this meta:
This is important because it shows how Johan’s identity ends up being strictly intertwined with those picture books. In a sense, Johan is the fruit of those books since he ends taking the name “Johan” used by different characters in those books, repeats the books’ lines in an obsessive way and even ends up unconsciously reproducing the stories in the real life. He does so by repeating specific lines and latching onto situations which resemble the ones he read in the books. For example, he identifies with the nameless monster of the books and tries to cope with the emptiness he feels inside by joining different families only to leave them and discard them once they are not able to fill the emptiness he feels. He identifies Nina as his other self, just like the Devil and the God of Peace of the books and repeats the devil’s lines to her. Once he finds Tenma aka an incredibly altruistic and selfless person who ends up saving his life he starts unconsciously replicating the same dynamic with him. He tempts people and manipulates them like the Devil of The Man with Big Eyes and the Man with the Big Mouth. It is actually interesting that Johan ends up always identifying with the devil instead than with other characters, but this can be partially explained by the fact that devils and monsters are the most recurrent characters in the books. This might be why Johan aka a child with a very frail sense of self ended up projecting on them specifically as characters appearing often and being constant. This might also be why he specifically latched on the name Johan which is often used in the books. In general, he develops a vision of the world which is pessimistic and nihilistic and which is the one conveyed by the book he was taught to study and to read.
This is important because in this way Johan becomes the heir of Bonaparta’s vision before his change of heart, while Nina who was shown a glimpse of love and of hope becomes the heir of Bonaparta’s ideals conveyed in A Peaceful Home.
Johan’s ideology is nothing, but the one offered by Bonaparta in his books. What is more, many of the issues Johan has can be found in Bonaparta as well. For example, Bonaparta, just like Johan, is a person who has trouble with who he is and this is conveyed through him using numerous pen-names for his books. It is also implied that he, just like Johan, saw himself in the monsters of his books. As a matter of fact he wanted to write a book with a monster falling in love and it is clear that that story would have told his love for Viera. Moreover, the massacre of the Red Rose Mansion where he killed all the people who knew Viera is the precursor both of Johan’s perfect suicide and of his violent and selfish way to “protect” Nina (let’s think about the “birthday party” he organized for her at the beginning of the story). Finally, Bonaparta’s interest for human minds and the experiments he conducted to “reprogram” human personalities can be easily associated with the ability at manipulation Johan shows throughout the series.
In short, Bonaparta and Johan are similar. However, Bonaparta, differently from Johan, has a name and a place to return to:
In other words, Bonaparta has roots whereas Johan lacks them. The story explores the importance of roots and names and how they can help build a person’s identity. Throughout these little things and the relationships the person develops, they can stop being empty and become a proper individual. All in all, the majority of the horrible things which happen throughout the story happen because of how frail the identity of the characters are. Because of this, it is meaningful that Bonaparta has a change of heart after rediscovering his roots.
Finally there is another parallelism between the character of his final book and Bonaparta himself, which I find interesting:
To me it is interesting that, while the thief forgets how to steal, Bonaparta forgets how to draw. It is as if Bonaparta’s art conveyed his malice and as he progressively loses it, he also loses his artistic drive:
He lost his ideal of creating perfect specimen and is trying to grasp something different. It is a different one (the twins brought up with love), but since it is an ideal he is not familiar with, he struggles to recreate it in his drawings.
It is a very interesting concept and I wonder if it can be explored more, maybe in another analysis. As for now, the only thing I can think of is how what Bonaparta was stealing was not money or material goods, but rather a person’s own “soul”/personhood, so it is interesting that he did it also through art and drawings.
Thank you for the ask! I hope it answers your question even if it may not be so detailed!
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