“Les Misérables” by Victor Hugo (post 2): Jean Valjean, the main character, undergoes an internal struggle and becomes “separated from himself”

In the first hundred pages, the narrator continues to refer to himself as “we,” except for one instance of “I” (1, p. 75), without explanation.

Jean Valjean, the main character, is introduced (1, p. 55). He is a 46-year-old man, who has just been released after nineteen years of brutal imprisonment for stealing a loaf of bread. His yellow passport will ensure perpetual persecution by society, against which he feels violent hate.

However, he encounters the good Bishop Bienvenu, whose respectful, kindly treatment evokes a countervailing attitude in Jean Valjean, so that “…a gigantic and decisive struggle had begun between…wickedness and…goodness…One thing was certain…he was no longer the same man…and was already so far separated from himself…He veritably saw this [wicked] Jean Valjean, this ominous face, before him. He was on the point of asking himself who that man was, and he was horror-stricken by it…He beheld himself then, so to speak, face to face…Where did he go? Nobody ever knew” (1, pp. 97-99).

Has the brutalized, wicked Jean Valjean been replaced by a good personality? Will the narrator continue to discuss radical, personal dividedness, and the switching between alternate personalities, in spiritual terms only? On the back cover, Hugo is quoted as calling this novel “a religious work.”

1. Victor Hugo. Les Misérables [1862]. New York, The Modern Library, 1992.