Father Goriot

Balzac himself called the hero of his novel, Father Goriot, "the Christ of fatherhood." The work still lives in the public consciousness today as the story of a suffering, vulnerable, martyred father, the novel of an old man who was abandoned by his daughters, but still loved them until the last moment. To understand the novel, it is necessary to know that Rastignac, who mourns Father Goriot, who is left alone and attends his funeral alone, appears in other Balzac novels as a great careerist, a hero of salons, the patron of the most beautiful women, the true emperor of life. Here, those traits come to the fore that can explain why this perhaps most important Balzac hero is also the most complex figure in the author's gallery of people, the most intricately "mixed" between good and evil. Rastignac, a resident of the same boarding house as Father Goriot, quickly notices with a sharp eye why his daughters do not, and cannot, reciprocate their father's love, what social - binding - movements govern even the smallest, most intimate cell, the inner world of the family. It is also from the meticulous description of the boarding house that we first get a picture of the Paris that will be the main scene of the subsequent plays, a symbol of the "big" society. The end of the novel, the last scene, is one of the most far-reaching, most mysterious endings in world literature: when Father Goriot is buried, an entire world is buried. Rastignac's famous words to the evening Paris seen from the cemetery hill: "Now it's our turn!" - not only indicate the further struggles of his own career, they represent not only a challenge, but also a prophecy of the birth of new worlds.