Overview
Flaubert’s unfinished satire follows two copyists who inherit money and attempt to master one field of knowledge after another, repeatedly exposing human ignorance and pretension.
This title is catalogued in Classics & Literature. Its reading profile is Medium and Advanced, with themes including knowledge, bourgeois life, satire, futility, class.
One-Page Summary
Bouvard and Pécuchet follows two Parisian copy clerks who meet by chance, discover that they share an appetite for knowledge, and eventually inherit enough money to abandon office life and pursue their intellectual dreams in the countryside. They decide they can learn almost anything by reading books and applying the theories they contain. Their experiments range through agriculture, chemistry, medicine, geology, archaeology, history, education, religion, and other fields. The pattern quickly becomes comic and tragic: they approach every subject with enormous enthusiasm, discover contradictory authorities, attempt a practical application, and suffer a humiliating failure.
Flaubert uses their incompetence to satirize the nineteenth century’s confidence in accumulation of information. Knowing thousands of facts does not automatically produce judgment. In fact, the more Bouvard and Pécuchet read, the more contradictions they encounter. Every expert has another expert disagreeing with him. Their problem is not that books are useless; it is that they expect knowledge to provide certainty on demand. The novel therefore becomes a comedy about the limits of human understanding. Bouvard and Pécuchet are ridiculous because they are overconfident, but they are also oddly admirable because they keep trying.
Their repeated failures expose something uncomfortable about everyone: the desire to become competent faster than experience allows.
Key Themes
Knowledge: This title is tagged with knowledge as one of its main themes.
Bourgeois life: This title is tagged with bourgeois life as one of its main themes.
Satire: This title is tagged with satire as one of its main themes.
Futility: This title is tagged with futility as one of its main themes.
Class: This title is tagged with class as one of its main themes.
Humor: This title is tagged with humor as one of its main themes.