lofty social circles, she retains her admiration of the prestige of aristocracy. Heir to the family home, documents, and portraits, she is the unofficial family historian. It is she who, through her ceaseless chatter, fills Georges’s childhood with family stories and legends.

Reixach

Reixach, an eighteenth century ancestor of Charles de Reixach (and thus also of Georges) whose portrait hangs in the family gallery. His populist sympathies compel him to drop the aristocratic particle “de” from his name. His political views lead to family and personal embarrassment and prompt his suicide, a scandal that the family tries to hide. Ironically, his portrait is marred by a crack in the paint at the level of his temple, which seems to memorialize the suicide. This portrait feeds Georges’s curiosity about de Reixach by proposing an ancestral prototype of suicide.

Wack

Wack, a fellow cavalry soldier. An Alsatian peasant, anti-Semitic, simple, and stubborn, with a fool’s face, Wack is a know-it-all and is constantly baited by his comrades. Wack is shot off his horse in an ambush that precedes de Reixach’s death.

Despite the fact that the main characters, except Georges, are filtered through Georges’s consciousness, The Flanders Road conveys a strong sense of character. This is particularly true of de Reixach, who emerges as a formidable web of complex issues concerning human nature and historical destiny. Severe and punctilious to a fault in maintaining the social position which his name and heritage commands, de Reixach is also perceived to be inscrutable. Did he, or did he not, allow his death to occur in the ambush? What exactly was his attitude toward Corinne’s infidelity? De Reixach’s inscrutability—which seemingly exists between the folds of an ambiguity embraced by cowardice and its opposite, stoicism—can be readily seen to be the product of his aristocratic demeanor, all the more so since his own end parallels that of one of his eighteenth century forebears.

In the case of Corinne, however, Simon alters his approach, or rather gives Georges a different mode of perception. In contrast to de Reixach,Corinne is seen in glimpses, at a distance, posed, suggestive. She remains an object of desire, whereas her husband is an emblem of that desire’s defeat and of other defeats which ensue. In depicting Corinne, the author’s painterly training is seen to spectacular advantage. The pictorializing effects have a peculiar appropriateness in the portrayal of Corinne, however, as they release vividly and persuasively the sensuality which she embodies. While de Reixach, Corinne, and the state of their marriage were vaguely known to Georges prior to de Reixach’s death, Corinne is kept at a distance until the climax of her brief, troubling erotic encounter with Georges. Thus, it is not necessarily the physical reality of Corinne which is the object of Georges’s preoccupations. It is the potential for love, for beauty, for pleasure which she embodies for him which sustains him. She is the counterpart to her husband’s militarism. Her commitment to living in the present, typified by her affair with Iglesia, is the opposite of her husband’s historical inheritance. Yet the two are indissolubly linked, each inescapably implicated in the other’s fate.

Both de Reixach and Corinne are animated by the intensity of Georges’s quest for the truth about them. In contrast, therefore—or as a means of enacting through the cast of characters the sense of doubleness which pervades The Flanders Road—the reader is also provided with characters lacking in mystery. These are Iglesia and Blum. Both characters serve to remind Georges that the world is also a material entity. Blum performs this service in the prison camp; Iglesia performs it in the de Reixach household. The ability to face and accommodate a given reality, to exist within and abide by the opportunities of the here and now, are what both these characters personify, each functioning as an antidote to the more internalized reality represented by the central trio of characters.

The crucial figure of that trio is Georges. Not only do the actual physical realities of both de Reixach and Corinne affect him profoundly, but also the readings which he conjures up out of the unadorned fact of the physical being affect him just as much, if not more. It is these readings, however, insatiably scanning the spectrum of experience embraced by de Reixach and Corinne (war and love) in order to discern motivation, certainty, and understanding, which sustain Georges and which give him the authoritative reality of the novel’s narrator. Georges embodies the spirit and value of quest, of the mind’s invincibility, and of the salvific nature of desire. Because of his mind’s restlessness, Georges is the novel’s most changeable character, and the shifts in narrative perspective which he brings about and to which he is subjected underline his mutability. Yet the very openness which the mutability brings about places him at the human, problematical center of the novel.