Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1939

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Character Analysis

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Character Analysis

Pierre Menard

Pierre Menard is the protagonist, and the critic’s analysis of Menard’s work forms the backbone of the story. Despite Menard’s importance to the narrative, he never directly appears in the text, but rather is quoted and analyzed by the critic, who is the narrator of the story.

Pierre Menard is characterized as an early 20th-century French poet and writer, whose works have gained widespread recognition by the time that the critic is writing about them. Menard is portrayed as prolific, with a number of academic and creative works enumerated by the critic to challenge the catalog composed by Mme. Henri Bachelier. Menard also has a personal relationship with the critic, with a couple of his letters to the critic quoted at length within the text.

Menard himself does not change over the course of the text, as the story takes on the form of a piece of literary criticism, which does not contain a scene-by-scene narrative but rather serves to analyze a text and the career of an author as a whole. However, what the reader knows of Menard does shift throughout. Early on, Menard is characterized purely through his literary output, and the reader gets the sense that Menard is educated, intelligent, and creative. When the critic begins to analyze Menard’s Don Quixote, the reader learns more about him as a character, namely his devotion to his own creative process. Menard’s quixotic quest to replicate Don Quixote through embodying its compositional process demonstrates a writer of ambition, but also a writer who is attempting to deconstruct the notion of what constitutes literature.

Borges characterizes Menard as a man of contrasts: a prolific and practical writer who, at the same time, becomes enamored with a task that is, simultaneously, impossible to complete and difficult to engage with as a reader. This conflict in the portrayal of Menard is what drives the evolving nature of the piece of literary criticism.

The Critic

The narrator of “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” is an unnamed literary critic who is writing a critical analysis of the works of the putative author. Due to the form of the text, the critic is never directly characterized, but the reader can infer aspects of the critic’s characterization based on the story’s tone, perspective, and writing style.

The tone of the story is one of self-seriousness; Borges is parodying the form of literary criticism, while at the same time engaging with its techniques. The critic, therefore, comes across to the reader as pretentious, academic, and very knowledgeable about literature. Being the narrator of the text but not the protagonist leads the critic to assume the role of a voice of authority. The critic’s academic writing style and constant allusions to other works highlight the comedic juxtaposition between absurdity and scholarly review.

This indirect characterization through writing style serves to reinforce the themes, particularly that of the Relationship Between Reader and Author. Just as the critic analyzes Menard’s Don Quixote, so too does the reader analyze this fictional piece of criticism, becoming a type of literary critic themselves in doing so. This collapsing of the distance between reader and author is a central concern of the story.

By the end of the story, the critic reveals more and more of his personal connection to Menard, which therefore destroys the supposed neutrality of his role as a critic, again suggesting a comedic commentary on literary criticism. However, the story itself challenges this idea of critical neutrality in its very structure, and the critic’s characterization toward the end as having a friendly interpersonal relationship with Menard further extends this motif.

Mme. Henri Bachelier

“Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” contains many, many names of different literary figures, most of whom are only mentioned once and cannot really be considered characters, but rather a form of literary allusion and intertextuality. However, Mme. Henri Bachelier, despite the fact that she’s only referenced a few times in the text, has narrative importance, having written the fictional catalog that the story is reacting to, and so can be considered a secondary character.

In the first paragraph of the story, the reader learns that Mme. Henri Bachelier has written a catalog of Menard’s work which was greeted by Menard’s admirers with “alarm, and even […] a degree of sadness” (Paragraph 1) due to its omissions and additions to Menard’s body of work. Bachelier, therefore, is indirectly characterized as a literary critic with less of a regard for accuracy or the author’s corpus than the critic himself, who creates a catalog of Menard’s publications as a direct response to Bachelier’s mistakes.

However, Mme. Henri Bachelier is also shown to have a relationship with Menard himself, as the critic rejects inclusion in his catalog of “a few vague sonnets of occasion destined for Mme. Henri Bachelier’s hospitable, or greedy, album des souvenirs” (Paragraph 23). This indicates that the critic might not be fully reliable in his critiques of Bachelier, since Menard himself seems to think that she is worthy of his sonnets. The ambiguity of the relationships between these three characters serves to highlight the uncertain and shifting nature of the text. The critic, as our narrator, cannot be trusted to communicate the objective truth, with even the existence of such a truth denied by the paradoxical nature of the narrative.