akallabeth-joie:

Because this has been on my mind a lot, and we won’t reach the barricade chapters until next summer.

Characters as symbols. Normally, I’m very much against this, preferring to think of characters are people, with motivations and backstory and development and other, human, traits.  But ever since that post about Jehan and Bahorel standing in for Hugo’s Romantic friends, and being the first members of their circle to die…I’ve come to accept how very elaborately symbolic these chapters are? 

Anyway:

Grantaire: Cynicism was passed out to begin with. Everyone’s fighting for ideals at this barricade, so poor Grantaire is just unconscious in the corner from the start. He wasn’t invited, anyway.

Bahorel: The very first casualty [of our named group] is the one eager for fighting. Like, if this wasn’t obviously a meta-commentary on the experience of being in combat, it just became that. The first thing to go is joy in fighting.

Prouvaire: Gentleness and appreciation for beauty dies next. Innocence, in a way? Also, this makes 2/3 of our resident Romantics gone, sacrificing themselves for the future [which our third brooding Romantic hero will actually get to realize].

[Mabeuf, Eponine & Gavroche have their own things going on.]

Bossuet: Bossuet’s optimistic and very unlucky. In quick succession, we lose ‘good humor’…

Feuilly: …international brotherhood/looking at the big picture…

Courfeyrac: …friendship and joi de vivre…

Joly:..and the rest of our optimism. I sort of see Joly & Bossuet as different forms of optimism: liveliness facing fear (at least, fear of disease) and facing ill-fortune.

Combeferrre: Philosophy helps others to the end, and is also the last casualty of the street battle.  From here (having lost all these characters/the good things they represent), Hugo makes it explicit that any sense of nobility is gone, and it’s all just awful, gory, and horrible–the descriptions of the fighting degrade into diabolical comparisons.

Marius: Our last romantic, and ‘the soul’ of the barricade, continues fighting while wounded. He’s incapacitated, but not killed, and lives to see the future.

Enjolras: The ideal of republican virtu, ‘the logic of the revolution’, remains completely unharmed even after everyone else is dead. Ideas are bulletproof, etc. At the extreme end, cynicism–Grantaire–finally wakes up, but only to voluntarily die at idealism’s feet.  The fighting ends.

But the soul persists. It goes (literally) underground, it hides, it slowly recuperates. But it lives. And it will be happy.