Le Père Goriot is a book which is not amenable to any brief, succinct thematic paraphrase. It is not so much one book but many, containing, as it does, a number of complex plots and sub-plots. In many ways Le Père Goriot can be seen as La Comédie humaine in miniature, a microcosm of La Comédie humaine as a whole (itself a microcosm of post-revolutionary French society - Le Père Goriot as microcosm of a microcosm) with its intricate interconnections, criss-crossing destinies and complex social networks.

The novel is set in Paris in 1819 - some four years after the final defeat of Napoléon Bonaparte and the restoration of the monarchy and is divided into four parts:

I. Une pension bourgeoise

II. Entrée dans le monde

III. Trompe-la-Mort

IV. La mort du père.

This organisation into four sections reveals the text's origins as a roman-feuilleton which were usually published in four installments. Indeed, Le Père Goriot was published in serial form in four isue of La Revue de Paris between December 1834 and Frebruary 1835. It first appeared in book form in March 1835 and was revised and re-published in 1843 without the chapter divisions.

The construction of the novel causes some ambiguity as to what constitutes its principal character, its main story and its thematic centre. Although the overall movement of the text is familiar insofar as Balzac adopts the plot parabola of melodrama: exposition, build up of tensions and complications and finally dénouement just who is the main focus of the story.

As the four section titles suggests, there are three main characters and plots in the novel: after a general exposition (`Une pension bourgeoise') there is the main character of Eugène de Rastignac and his ambition for wealth and power (`'Entrée dans le monde'), there is also the character of Vautrin and his ambitions (`Trompe-la-Mort') and there is also the character of Old Goriot and his daughters. These characters and plots are, of course, not separate but interconnected and, I think, no one character or plot takes precedence over another. Balzac's refusal to place any single character centre stage is in part due to his desire to uncover the deep-rooted connectedness of the social world. Things are complex, social life is somehow all linked up.

The first section, Une pension bourgeoise, is central to our understanding of the rest of the novel as it sets the tone and describes the main characters. It begins in la Pension Vauquer, a rather down-at-heel boarding house inhabited by those who have seen better days or who wish to see better days in the future. The boarding house has a rather unusual and disparate social mix but it one which one might have encountered in overcrowded Restoration Paris with its severe shortage of lodgings. Their shared characteristic however, is that they are all thrown together as the result of a society in transition. There are seven boarders at the Pension Vauquer: Madame Couture and her ward Victorine Taillefer; Poiret, a rather ineffectual old man; Mademoiselle Michonneau, an elderly spinster; le Père Goriot, an old vermicelli dealer; Vautrin, a charismatic and deeply ambiguous figure from the criminal underworld who has so far escaped the clutches of the law and Eugène de Rastignac, an impoverished young man of aristocratic descent come to Paris to make his fortune. He eventually makes his way in Parisian high society through his relationship with Delphine de Nucingen who helps network him into fashionable society and who uses her husband, the corrupt Baron de Nucingen and his dishonest financial affairs to help make his fortune.

After having just sketched out some of the main characters in Le Père Goriot it seems as good a point as any to say a few brief words about character in general. According to Ann Jefferson, the central pillar in the edifice of the nineteenth-century novel was character:

So character then, provided the telos of fiction. Telos is a Greek word meaning goal or end goal. All narrative are teleological in the sense that they are leading up to some final objective. To take one simple example, in the whodunnit or detective novel, the discovery of the murderer or criminal provides the end goal for the narrative.

In most nineteenth-century fiction character provided this goal. This tendency is clearly illustrated by the frequency with which proper names were used as book titles: Madame Bovary - which Flaubert described as "une biographie" (Correspondance III, Paris, Conard, 1926-33 p.247) - Anna Karenina, Effi Briest, David Copperfield etc., the list is endless.

The gradual working-out of individual destiny, the revelation of hidden motivations, the identification of the protagonist's faulty understanding of him/herself, the patient plotting of the conflict between individual and society and its ultimate resolution - all these things were central to the novel of the nineteenth century. The function of the novelist, in the words of E.M. Forster, was "to reveal the hidden life at its source".

This particular concept of character is, of course, shared by Balzac although in Le Père Goriot a number of different characters, namely Goriot, Vautrin and Rastignac take turns in sharing the telos of the text.

The other important point to restate regarding Balzac's conception of character is that rarely interested in character as a means of exploring unique psychology. Rather, he sees character as a means of exploring social types. In short and at the risk of oversimplification, Balzac's characters tend to be more two-dimensional than say those in Stendhal or in Flaubert. Julien Sorel is, to paraphrase Christopher Prendergast, infinitely more complex and mysterious than the simple stereotype of the ambitious young parvenu. For example, Goriot is less an individual in the grip of an obsession than the very incarnation or embodiment of doting, indulgent fatherhood. Indeed, towards the end of the novel he is described as "Ce Christ de la Paternité" (Folio p.282). Similarly, Rastignac is less interesting as an actual individual - he is certainly less interesting than his distant literary cousin Julien Sorel - than as an example or type of young post-revolutionary aristocrat whose aspirations and moral standards are less than heroic and which reflect the moral squalor of the age. Probably the most interesting character in the novel is the arch-criminal Vautrin. Vautrin who is both outside of the law by dint of his criminal activities and outside of the prevailing moral and social by dint of his homosexuality (Le Père Goriot contains a number of scenes of strained homoerotic tension between Vautrin and Rastignac and in other works within La Comédie humaine, Vautrin is seen living with Théodore, an extremely handsome Corsican bandit. See also: Apprenez un secret: il n'aime pas les femmes Folio p.226), represents the corruption of Restoration France at its most extreme as well as offering its most scathing critique. To have recognized money as the animating principle of social life is the distinctive trait of arch-criminal Vautrin. Vautrin pushes the governing impulse of an acquisitive society to its very limit. He explodes its hidden contradictions and explodes its moral squalor. Vautrin is, I would argue, more interesting for the ideas and forces he represents than for what he is as a character.

Balzac then, is interested in social types and the influence of surroundings or the cadre on personality and behaviour. Balzac sees character as formed by the social, the historical and the environmental. Balzac puts this very succinctly towards the beginning of Le Père Goriot when he writes on Madame Vauquer and her boarding house:

This particular theory is often referred to as the oyster and its shell metaphor.

As I mentionned just a moment ago, of the seven boarders at the Pension Vauquer, only three have their own story: Goriot, Vautrin and Rastignac. Their three stories make up the three foci of the novel. Their stories are not absolutely separate, independant but interconnected and inter-dependant. Moreover, underlying their stories is an underlying thematic unity.

Goriot, Vautrin and Rastignac are all movers in social space, they are all passeurs entre deux rives moving backwards and forwards across the boundaries of class, breeding and culture. Goriot's daughters are both married into the French aristocracy (both old and new) and rely on his excessive paternal love to bail them out the financial crises that constantly assail them (Anastasie is being ruined by her lover's passion for gambling, Delphine by her husband's meaness and shady financial dealings). There is a constant va et vient between Goriot in the poverty of the boarding house and the glittering society of his daughters as he sells and pawns his last possessions. Vautrin too, is not so much a man of the world as a man of two worlds, who understands the operations of huigh society and finds it little different from the workings of a much lower-class criminal underworld (see his comments: Folio p.73, p.77 and p. 114). And lastly, there is Rastignac who, although impoverished is of noble birth and can glide in and out of both milieux with greater ease than any of the other characters.

At this point I should introduce the main characters of the aristocratic milieu where half the action of Le Père Goriot takes place. The main characters associated with the beau monde, the upper-class society Rastignac is trying to infiltrate are:

Madame de Beauséant is a relative of Rastignac and she helps him in his effort to enter society. Madame de Beauséant herself is agonizing over the future marriage of her lover, the Marquis d'Ajuda-Pinto, to another woman.

Anastasie de Restaud is married to Monsieur de Restaud but is herself having an affair with the dissolute dandy Maxime de Trailles who is ruining her financially.

Delphine de Nucingen, one of Goriot's daughter married to the Alsatian banker, the Baron de Nucingen. Delphine is in the process of being abandonned by her lover, the Duc de Marsay and Rastignac sees his opportunity. He begins to court Delphine as a way of gaining entry into smart society and by the end of the novel their relationship is well under way.

As my brief description of the aristocratic characters and their difficulties underlines, money is a major preoccupation in Le Père Goriot. In fact it is the preoccupation. The other deep thematic link that joins Goriot to Vautrin to Rastignac is money, the lack of it, the desire for it, the desparate need for it. Indeed, if La Comédie humaine may be said to have a single thematic core it is the omnipresence and omnipotence of money. The most frequently occuring or recurring fictional character in La Comédie humaine is the Baron de Nucingen (a banker) with the evil money-lender Gobseck not far behind.

I can't mention in detail every single reference to money in Le Père Goriot since there are far too many. However here are a few key references:

Firstly, from the very beginning of the novel money assumes a vital importance:

Here, brutally and bluntly articulated, is a society where you are wat you own, where être is avoir, where human worth is measured in financial terms. The concern and favours Madame Vauquer dishes out to her boarders are directly proportional to how much they spend in her establishment. You are what you spend.

Here is another interesting reflexion made by Rastignac:

Again, articulated in blunt and brutal terms is the belief that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. Justice is a commodity to be purchased and wealth a license to transcend the moral standards of the rest of society.

Money and the desire to amass money corrupts and corrupts absolutely. Even the character who most represents goodness in the novel, Goriot, is shown to be a man who made his fortune by exploiting famine and natural disaster to his own financial gain. Rastignac borrows money from his destitute family and even takes Goriot's money at the end. Vautrin is forever on the lookout for a quick deal and dreams of being a rich plantation-owner in America. Madame Vauquer is constantly cutting corners to maximize her profits. Both Poiret and Mademoiselle Michonneau conspire to `shop', `sell out' (financial metaphors are particularly appropriate here) Vautrin to the police for material gain. Baron de Nucingen is constantly involved in shady business dealings, investing borrowed money in illegal ventures and the like. Gobseck is constantly lending money to the grandes dames of smart society, Maxime de Trailles is constantly `poncing off' (the prostitutional metaphor is intended) his mistresses to pay off his gambling debts etc.

At the very end of the novel at the funeral of Goriot, Rastignac has to pay the priest for the funeral service (70fr) and he is forced to borrow 20 centimes from Christophe to pay the grave digger a small tip.

Connected with the theme of the omnipotence of money is the theme of materialism. The world of Le Père Goriot is very much a material world. It is a text absolutely cluttered with the objects and paraphenalia of everyday life. Remember that Balzac wanted to be all-inclusive `archeologist of the social furniture' of the age. He therefore considered it as an indispensible part of his task of social reconstruction to bring the everyday into the sphere of art. However, even though he includes the banal and the everyday in his work, he endlessly reenacts the desperate attempts of the characters to achieve wealth and success in order to live lives filled exclusively with expensive and luxurious material goods, to acheive `distinction' and thereby soar above the meagre and the tasteless. In the endless quest for `distinction' in Balzac's novels a very special place is reserved for things. In his theories of elegance and dandyism (the new aristocratic ethos of the nineteenth century), Balzac considered that distinction was now demonstrated by an individual's instinctive capacity to choose beautiful things with which to express and decorate the self.

Expensive jewellery, fur coats, silk dresses, fine leather boots and gloves, expensively tailored clothes are all described in minute, loving and fetischistic detail in the novel. One typical scene occurs on page 89 of the Folio edition when Rastignac sees Maximes de Trailles, the society dandy for the very first time.

Le Père Goriot is full of scenes of acquiring and amassing and of denuding and dispossession. Rags to riches, for richer for poorer, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, the spectacle of society performed in Le Père Goriot is of a frantic desire to accumulate wealth. This frantic desire saps the energies of individuals, shortens their lives and leaves them empty shells. Both bourgeois acquisitiveness and aristocratic excess hasten the process of death. Death is omnipresent in Le Père Goriot. It is interesting  to note, for example, that references to cemetaries or cities of the dead are to be found at the beginning and the end of the novel: on page 23 (Folio) there is a reference to "les catacombes" which were former quarries converted to store millions of human remains when the charnel houses of Paris were cleared in 1785 and of course at the end of the novel on pages 365-7 when Goriot is buried at Père Lachaise cemetary. The action of the novel then is, in a way, both prefaced and concluded with references to death and places associated with death. And there is a neat circularity here, a circularity suggestive of the inevitablity of death and the futility of the desire to accumulate.

When Goriot in fact dies at the end of the novel, having long since past the process of denuding and dispossession, he leaves the boarding house as a pathetic, destitute corpse, propped up on two chairs out on the open pavement in the deserted street, reduced to a human zero, a piece of human debris. In Le Père Goriot, Paris is a place of decadence and ruin where the desire for material possession is never far from death. Is it coincidence that the description of Goriot's funeral should be so full of references to money?

The little dances the characters in the novel perform around one another may be, and indeed, have been by Peter Lock compared to the mediaeval danses macabres. The danses macabres, popular in mediaeval Europe, were representations of the social hierarchy from popes to kings to peasants all holding hand with skeletons and joined in a vast chain dancing to their death.