Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac

Published 1835 · 371 pages · 106,724 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Coming-of-Age, Literary Fiction

How hard is Père Goriot to read?

Père Goriot scores 55 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 68 out of 100
Balzac's narrative employs a rich, formal vocabulary with many literary and somewhat archaic terms (e.g., 'dolorous literature,' 'cicerone,' 'hypotaxis,' 'posset dish,' 'maccaboy,' 'morganatic couple'). The translation maintains this elevated diction, requiring a reader to be comfortable with a broad range of words, though rarely resorting to true obscurity like 'Ulysses' or 'Finnegans Wake.' Specialized terms are primarily related to social strata and Parisian life of the era.
Sentence structure: 75 out of 100
The text features long, multi-clause sentences with frequent subordination and parenthetical remarks, characteristic of 19th-century French realism. Balzac often builds intricate descriptions and complex psychological observations within single sentences, demanding sustained attention from the reader. While not reaching the extreme lengths or experimental structures of a 'Ulysses' or 'Absalom, Absalom!', the prose is significantly more demanding than contemporary fiction.
Abstraction: 65 out of 100
While grounded in a vivid, detailed depiction of Parisian society and character, 'Père Goriot' frequently delves into philosophical and sociological observations. The narrator often pauses to generalize about human nature, society's mechanisms, and moral dilemmas, elevating the narrative beyond a purely concrete story. Vautrin's lengthy monologues, in particular, introduce explicit philosophical arguments about ambition, virtue, and corruption.
Information density: 70 out of 100
The narrative is dense with character introductions, social commentary, and intricate plot developments, even within a short excerpt. Balzac meticulously details the setting, the characters' appearances, their social standing, and their inner thoughts, often layering multiple pieces of information in single paragraphs. This requires constant attention to absorb the nuances of the social world and the motivations driving the characters, though it lacks the sheer encyclopedic scope of 'Ulysses' or 'War and Peace'.
Narrative indirection: 40 out of 100
The omniscient narrator frequently interjects with explicit social commentary and psychological explanations, directly telling the reader what to think about characters like Mme. Vauquer or the nature of Parisian society. While initial events, such as Goriot melting silver, present a mystery, the narrative quickly provides context or character speculation to guide interpretation, making deep inference less necessary.
Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
Balzac employs clear, often explicitly stated, symbolic elements to underscore his social critique, such as the 'blistered and disfigured' Cupid representing Parisian love, or the 'slough' metaphor for society. Objects like Goriot's silver posset dish carry emotional weight, symbolizing his past and sacrifice, but their meaning is generally direct rather than deeply allegorical, placing it above simple realism but below heavy symbolism.
Ironic distance: 50 out of 100
The narrative voice often employs explicit irony and satire, particularly in its scathing descriptions of Parisian society and characters like Mme. Vauquer, but this is typically a direct authorial critique rather than a subtle, unreliable perspective. The gap between what is presented and what the author intends is minimal, as the narrator frequently clarifies the moral implications of events and characters.
Resolution withholding: 60 out of 100
While the immediate plot points and character backstories are largely revealed or foreshadowed, the narrative leaves the ultimate moral and ethical dilemmas faced by Eugene de Rastignac unresolved. The ending of the excerpt, with Eugene's internal conflict and Vautrin's cynical proposition, resists easy closure on the question of how one should live in a corrupt society, similar to 'The Great Gatsby' where the plot resolves but thematic meaning remains open.
Structural complexity: 40 out of 100
The novel employs a traditional, largely chronological narrative structure, primarily following Eugene de Rastignac's perspective while incorporating clear, delineated flashbacks to provide character backstories. Although there are shifts in focus to other characters and their internal thoughts, the overall progression is linear and does not feature complex formal experiments or fragmented timelines, making it straightforward to follow.

How Père Goriot is regarded

Père Goriot holds a literary regard score of 87 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

What Père Goriot asks you to hold together

Père Goriot sustains Formal (11) on the Model of Hierarchical Complexity: a line between variables. It peaks at Systematic (12), a constellation on pages 136–138. Read from the full text, all 212 passages. What the stages mean.

Where Père Goriot sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (212 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Père Goriot scores 66 out of 100. A second mythos, comedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.2. About the map of stories.

Mode: Low Mimetic
All is true ,—so true, that every one can discern the elements of the tragedy in his own house, perhaps in his own heart.
Symbol: Formal
it discovers the cook, it foreshadows the lodgers—the picture of the house is completed by the portrait of its mistress.
Mythos: Tragic Pathos (Irony phase 4) (irony iv)
And this was all the funeral oration delivered over him who had been for Eugene the type and embodiment of Fatherhood.
Genre: Novel + Anatomy
You may survey its surface and describe it; but no matter how numerous and painstaking the toilers in this sea, there will always be lonely and unexplored regions in its depths

Where the story of Père Goriot takes place

  • Paris, 1819, the main setting
  • Paris, Maison Vauquer and the salons, winter 1819-1820 (Restoration) (1819 to 1820)

7 things that are true of Père Goriot, with the passage for each

  1. Mme Vauquer's boarding-house has an official lodger count of seven, plus students and regulars bringing the dinner table to eighteen.

    There were usually eighteen people at dinner, and there was room, if need be, for twenty at Mme. Vauquer’s table

  2. Goriot, in secret, twists his silver dinner service into an ingot with a rope so he can sell it for his daughter.

    he was pulling at this rope with such enormous force that they were being crushed and twisted out of shape

  3. Rastignac wins at roulette on a stake of one hundred francs lent by Delphine, bringing back seven thousand two hundred.

    “You have seven thousand, two hundred francs of your own,” the old gentleman said in his ear.

  4. Vautrin is unmasked as an escaped convict when Michonneau drugs his coffee and the letters brand-marked on his shoulder appear.

    Mlle. Michonneau gave his shoulder a sharp slap, and the two portentous letters appeared, white against the red.

  5. Goriot's dying hands search for his daughters' hair and his last words are 'Ah! my angels!'

    as his fingers caught convulsively at their hair, they heard a faint whisper: “Ah! my angels!”

  6. Only two empty carriages bearing his sons-in-law's arms follow Goriot's funeral to Père-Lachaise.

    two empty carriages, with the armorial bearings of the Comte de Restaud and the Baron de Nucingen, arrived and followed in the procession to Pere-Lachaise.

  7. The book ends with Rastignac challenging Paris from the cemetery and going to dine with Mme de Nucingen.

    “Henceforth there is war between us.” And by way of throwing down the glove to Society, Rastignac went to dine with Mme. de Nucingen.

Scenes in Père Goriot that Frye would name

29 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Pathos, untitled
The father’s last breath must have been a sigh of joy, and in that sigh his whole life was summed up; he was cheated even at the last. The death of Goriot is the sacrificial scene of the book.
Anagnorisis, untitled
In that flash the real Vautrin shone forth, revealed at once before them all The wig is struck off and the convict's identity is revealed to the whole household.
Pharmakos, untitled
there was among the eighteen men and women who met round the dinner table a poor creature, despised by all the others, condemned to be the butt of all their jokes. The narrator sets up the pharmakos explicitly before introducing Goriot.
Pharmakos, untitled
The poor old man thus suddenly attacked was for a moment too bewildered to do anything. Goriot is the table's scapegoat, bullied by Vautrin and the students for sport.
Anagnorisis, untitled
“Why, child that you are,” cried the Vicomtesse, “Mme. de Restaud was a Mlle. Goriot!” Rastignac discovers the link between Goriot and the Comtesse, a recognition that pivots his understanding of Paris.
Point of epiphany, untitled
He went a few paces further, to the highest point of the cemetery, and looked out over Paris and the windings of the Seine From the hill of Père-Lachaise, Rastignac sees the world he will conquer, where the dead and the living city touch.

Books that share these scenes with Père Goriot

About the author

Honoré de Balzac